Brexit Pun Becomes EU Campaign Slogan for Biggest Finnish Party
Brexit Pun Becomes EU Campaign Slogan for Biggest Finnish Party
(Bloomberg) -- Making fun of Brexit has become a campaign slogan for Finland’s biggest party.
As the Finnish Social Democrats prepare for European Union elections on May 26, the party has plastered English-language placards across the country that riff off the notion that the EU exit sought by Britain is something to be avoided at all costs.
“We don’t Brexit. We fix it,” the slogan reads.
Perhaps somewhat ironically, the party has settled on a formulation that happens to be the same as that used by the country’s euroskeptics during the European debt crisis. Targeting a Finnish exit from the euro, the populist group lobbied for a Fixit.
At the height of Europe’s debt crisis, Fixit was just one of a number of national labels used to conjure up visions of an EU exit. Others included Grexit for Greece and Quitaly for Italy. In Austria, it was Outstria.
Iida Vallin, a spokeswoman for Finland’s Social Democrats, said the party’s choice of slogan was a deliberate pun.
“We need more cooperation and agreement” in the EU, she said by phone. “We are working together to build a better EU, we don’t want to break it.”
--With assistance from Leo Laikola.
To contact the reporter on this story: Kati Pohjanpalo in Helsinki at kpohjanpalo@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tasneem Hanfi Brögger at tbrogger@bloomberg.net
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