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Notes -
Finland has a new right-wing government. It's been called the most right-wing one in Finland's postwar history, since it is headed by centre-right National Coalition, contains the right-wing populist/nationalist Finns Party and doesn't contain the Centre Party, which has been previously been in government with these two but is, as the name says, more centrist.
Essentially, the new government is combining an anti-union, austerity-oriented economic agenda of the center-right with a list of anti-immigration measures favored by the nationalists. However, while the foreign papers have mostly been concerned with the claims that the most important thing about this govt is far-right inclusion, the economic agenda comes first; the anti-immigration measures, while they probably will lead to immigration cuts, are still not as hard as , for instance, what a roughly similar coalition in Sweden has set last year.
Insofar as economic measures go,
There's also two minor parties, the Christian Democrats who basically set no demands for participation and are just happy to be a part of this government and Swedish People's Party, a liberal party that watches over the interests of the Swedish-speaking minority and had considerable troubles fitting in with the Finns Party's nationalism and probably managed to prevent some of their more hardline immigration proposals from taking force.
It varies. There's been a fair amount of discussion about immigrant street gangs forming in various Finnish cities, at least before the election, which boosted this issue. Much of Finnish immigration discussion is basically "predictive"; looking towards other European countries (chiefly Sweden) and warning that this might/will also happen in Finland. However, insofar as the Finns Party's success in this election went, the more salient issue was probably their opposition to environmental regulations and, in particular, promise to bring the fuel prices down; if they can't do that, and it is very unclear if this government's programme will manage to do that, they'll suffer.
Halla-aho is basically an internet poaster turned into a politician. One could very well imagine him posting to this very forum. He originally got famous as a blogger, and there's a number of Finns Party politicians whose first touch with politics was posting in his blog's guestbook or the related forum, including - or at least it is theoretized - the Finns Party's current chair Riikka Purra.
His famous controversial statements listed in that article are actually a bit hard for me to analyze any more, since they have been abjudicated in Finnish politics approximately hundreds of times and the result is always the same; he refuses to apologize or really comment on them, and that's that. Probably politically the smartest thing for him to do. More interesting is, for instance, that he's not only Russophobic - which is, for understandable reasons, not that uncommon in Finnish politics - but a genuine Ukrainophile; his "day job" before politics was being a researcher of Church Slavonic, and he speaks what I understand to be fluent Ukrainian. This has allowed him to command "strange new respect" in many liberal circles, which probably made it easier for his party to participate in gov't, as well.
His current job as the speaker of the Parliament is probably - in his opinion - perfect for him, since it means he doesn't have to participate in actual grubby politics - something he was obviously but has a job that undeniably is a sign of political respect and forces even left-wing politicians to address him as the "Honorable Speaker".
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