Finland Puts Another Crack in EU Shield Against Nationalism
Finland Puts Another Crack in EU Defenses Against Nationalism
(Bloomberg) -- The ouster of former trade union leader Antti Rinne as Finnish prime minister is another worrying sign for the establishment forces trying to hold the European Union steady amid the rising storms of nationalism.
Rinne, a 57-year-old Social Democrat, was ostensibly pushed out on Tuesday for misleading parliament about a labor dispute at the state-owned postal service after just six months in office. But bubbling under the surface were sliding ratings for the main governing parties in a five-way coalition, who sought to fend off the threat of the right-wing populists Finns party.
“We can see this across the democratic world: the populists have created a third block between the center-left and the center-right, and have stolen voters from both sides,” Fredrik Erixon, director of the European Centre for International Political Economy, said by phone. “As a consequence you end up with weak governments that will be highly sensitive to any type of development where the parties are losing support in the polls or where they are seen not standing up for themselves inside the government.”
The governing parties -- including the free-market Center Party and the socialist Left Alliance -- have vowed to find a replacement for Rinne to keep the coalition intact. But another backroom deal is unlikely to help their broader objective of winning the argument against the nationalists. Since being forced out of government in 2017, the Finns have seen their support surge to become the country’s most popular party.
Nationalist movements have been piling pressure on moderate forces across Europe, particularly since the refugee crisis of 2015. In France, Emmanuel Macron forged a broad centrist platform to defeat Marine Le Pen at the ballot box in 2017. Italy’s Democratic Party cut a deal with the left-wing populists of Five Star to keep the anti-immigration demagogue Matteo Salvini out of power this summer.
In Germany, both the country’s traditional parties are struggling to cope with the rise of the AfD in parts of the East where voters feel Berlin has ignored their concerns for too long. A similar pattern has emerged in the Nordic region’s biggest economy, where the right-wing Sweden Democrats are on course to become the country’s largest party. The group has long been shunned for its neo-Nazi roots and historical ties to extremists. But its leader, Jimmie Akesson, openly talks of replacing the Social Democrats as the dominant force in Swedish politics.
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In Finland, Rinne’s premature departure caps months of mounting tension between the main groups within the coalition. It had taken weeks to broker a deal after April’s inconclusive elections and one of the main points driven by the Social Democrats was the need to keep the Finns out of government.
And that move fueled the Finns narrative that the establishment was out to get them and their supporters.
The lesson, says Erixon, is that moderate parties shouldn’t be tempted by the shortcut solution of large, unwieldy, alliances that are brought together more by what they oppose than what they represent.
“Establishment parties shouldn’t form governments that have no organizing principle at all, where the political conflicts inside government are simply too big in order to last,” he said. Instead, they need “a little bit more eagerness to get their voters back and to be more careful in how they position themselves and how they present their policies,” he said.
He points to Mette Frederiksen’s success in Denmark, where the Social Democrat leader has regained votes from the anti-immigration Danish People’s Party by toughening up her party’s stance toward foreigners.
To contact the reporters on this story: Nick Rigillo in Copenhagen at nrigillo@bloomberg.net;Kati Pohjanpalo in Helsinki at kpohjanpalo@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Christian Wienberg at cwienberg@bloomberg.net, ;Tasneem Hanfi Brögger at tbrogger@bloomberg.net, Ben Sills
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