The good people of Finland decided to elect the most right wing government in the history of the country just a couple of months ago. The government is a coalition of an extreme right wing party, a right wing christian party, the Swedish People’s Party (nominally centrist) and a “fiscally conservative” party – ie. they mostly leave saying the bigoted shit out loud to the other two parties, but occasionally eg want to fund a Waffen SS volunteer “memorial organization” with government money, to spread “true information” about the SS volunteers who totally weren’t ideologically motivated and totally didn’t participate in the Holocaust (they absolutely did and we have archived war diares as proof, but it hurts the neo-nazis’ feelings if you say that out loud.)
The parties finally managed to come up with a plan on how to run things 10 days ago (hint: not well), and the extremist party has already gotten into multiple PR fuckups due to being full of neo-nazis and neo-nazi sympathizers, and now one of the newly minted ministers had to resign officially due to making a “joke” (ie. it’s not a joke until it gets him in trouble, and then it’s a joke) about how climate change could be solved by forcing Africans to abort children.
The actual reason is that the fresh minister in question also made a speech at a neo-nazi rally and made “jokes” about HH / 88, made a klansman snowman complete with a noose, hired a senior adviser who is a literal neo-nazi and has made eg. social media posts admiring Hitler, lied about almost literally every achievement in his life – university, multiple years of work experience, etc – and the list just goes fucking on and on.
And don’t get me started on what these people are doing to the country’s public sector funding. Education is fucked, public healthcare is double fucked, welfare is extra triple fucked with fuck on top.
What’s happening in Finland that they turned to the right wing to solve their problems? Here in Australia we’ve recently swept right wing governments at the federal and state level, they were not nearly as extreme, just your garden variety corrupt, climate-denying boomers mismanaging our country to mediocrity.
“Poor abstract reasoning skills” is probably the most sensitive way I can put it. We’re a fairly conservative country at the best of times.
We had a leftist government for the first time in over a decade, and they started right before COVID hit. They handled things OK, but we had a government full of young female ministers and that did not sit right with conservatives. All of the right wing parties and their supporters started lying about eg. employment going down due to government mismanagement (it actually went up despite COVID), the PM using drugs (she wasn’t), that the government is taking on too much debt (they weren’t, at last in comparison to the other Nordics or central Europe), etc etc. Crises tend to draw people to authoritarianism, and here especially the extreme right wing party is now the second most popular right after the “fiscal conservatives”.
But we have the government we deserve. If people are so unfathomably stupid as to want austerity and Nazi ministers, we don’t deserve anything better
That’s rough. Come to think of it, I remember seeing the headlines about “outrage over Finland PM doing young-person things”.
It’s such a weird time and if we hadn’t seen a swing in my country towards the far more reasonable left wing I’m sure I would feel pretty grim about the future. I hope there’s a shift over there before they have a chance to ruin things too badly!