The far right is in government in Finland – and it’s no junior partner. A four-party coalition led by the conservative National Coalition Party (NCP) has been pieced together after 74 days of negotiations following the April election. The Finns Party – a right-wing populist party with a history of promoting ethnic Finnish nationalism, proposing tight restrictions on immigration and opposing climate policies and LGBTQI+ rights – supplies the new government’s deputy prime minister and seven cabinet ministers. Among the key ministries it now controls are those of finance, home affairs, justice and international development.

Finns Party rises

Political shifts are nothing new in Finland, which has regularly seen the leadership of coalitions switch between the Centre Party, NCP and centre-left Social Democratic Party (SDP). What’s relatively new is the starring role of the far-right Finns Party, now in government for the second time. This time around its influence has grown, underlining the further normalisation of its role in mainstream politics.

The Finns Party has been a force to reckon with ever since it came third in the 2011 election, when it capitalised on a loss of support for established parties due to a political funding scandal and Europe’s 2009-onwards economic crisis. The party went on to come second in 2015, 2019 and now 2023. It served in a right-wing government formed after the 2015 election, but didn’t last long: its parliamentary party split over a leadership dispute in 2017, with a breakaway faction staying in government but disappearing off the map at the next election. The Finns Party then only narrowly missed out on coming first in 2019; the SDP then formed a centre-left coalition that excluded it.

Later that year Finland made global headlines when 34-year-old Sanna Marin became the new SDP leader and the world’s youngest prime minister. The heads of all five parties in government were women, with four of them under 40. With similar leaders like Jacinda Ardern then in power in New Zealand, it was tempting to see the burgeoning of a new kind of political leadership that was young, progressive and feminist in character. But Marin faced personal attacks over her private life. Last year she had to take a drugs test to quell rumours following the circulation of a video of her drinking and dancing at a party.

Despite the attacks, Marin’s popularity exceeded that of her party, which hasn’t led the opinion polls for two and half years. But unusually for an incumbent, even though it finished third, the SDP gained a few seats in 2023. However all its coalition partners left and centre – the Centre Party, Green League and Left Alliance – incurred big losses. Some voters likely blamed the Green and Left Alliance parties for climate and economic policies at the heart of the election debate. But some supporters of these parties may have switched to the SDP to try to stop the Finns Party entering government.

Either way, this shift paved the way for an alternative coalition led by the biggest winner – the NCP, which gained 10 seats to finish with 48 out of 200 seats –, while the Finns Party won its highest-ever total, 46 seats.

A change of economic direction

The economy was the most pressing issue for many voters, and the choice on offer was stark: the SDP promised more public spending, including on education and healthcare, which it said would help boost the economy, while the NCP and Finns Party committed to reducing the public debt that had grown under the old government through a programme of economic austerity, meaning public spending cuts, including for social welfare programmes.

The Finns Party’s economic pledges focused on some familiar far-right targets: immigration and climate policy. Marin’s government had introduced new climate policies, including a programme to expand renewable energy production, promising to achieve net zero status by 2035. While the NCP agreed with this pledge, committing to help meet it by ramping up nuclear power, the Finns Party promised to defer this target.

Its influence on the new government seems clear. Climate and international development spending are reportedly among the funding lines to be slashed, along with big social welfare cuts, with a crackdown on immigration one of the key means announced of achieving this. Even though Finland hosts fewer refugees than its Nordic neighbouring countries while the global number of refugees just keeps growing, Finland plans to host fewer refugees and tighten immigration and citizenship rules.

Already a Finns Party minister has faced accusations of neo-Nazi links. Economic Affairs Minister Vilhelm Junnila was reported to have made Nazi references and to have spoken at an event organised by a far-right movement. This led to a no-confidence vote, which he survived, with hundreds of people protesting outside parliament as the vote was held.

Other options for a coalition government might have been possible. A coalition of the broad centre may have been feasible, bringing the NCP and SDP together. But Finland’s new prime minister, NCP leader Petteri Orpo, has made the choice to bring the far right into government, possibly under the long-proven misconception that it can be tamed rather than legitimised.

Civil society’s concerns

Civil society organisations generally had constructive relationships with the old government, which was seen to have strengthened its engagement with civil society and introduced initiatives to promote more transparent and open government. The new government is saying it will keep working with civil society, but civil society will have to play multiple roles: to keep trying to engage with the government constructively to seek to influence it, but also to scrutinise and call out its actions when they impact on human rights. Migrants’ rights will be one crucial area for civil society, since government rhetoric can only inflame hate speech and violence.

Key civic freedoms will need to be safeguarded, particularly the right to protest. Finland’s active and vocal climate movement was already the subject of restrictions under the old government. Recent mass protests, including by Elokapina, Finland’s Extinction Rebellion movement, were met with arrests and charges. Forty-six people were reportedly arrested at a roadblock protest in October 2022. In February 2022, 56 Elokapina protesters were charged with insubordination following a protest in which they glued themselves to government headquarters. People have also been fined for disobeying police orders and blocking roads. If the new government de-emphasises climate policies, climate protesters demanding stronger action could face tougher restrictions.

The challenges of course reach beyond Finland. These latest political developments are in line with a broader international trend in which significant numbers of people, in economically hard times, are rejecting incumbents and conventional political parties and looking for something different. They often find it in right-wing nationalism and populism, which continues to make inroads. In Finland’s neighbour, Sweden, a far-right party once on the political fringes came second in last year’s election. In its fellow European Union (EU) member state Italy, a far-right party that sprang from the neofascist movement now heads the government. Eyes will now turn to another EU member, Spain, where far-right party Vox hopes to do well in July elections.

The need is more urgent than ever to take on the emotive rhetoric of the far right and win the argument that the rights of all humans must be respected. Finnish civil society needs to rise up to that challenge.