While much hay has been made over 2015’s assortment of political upsets, one of the most interesting applecarts to be overturned has received little attention in international media. European populism, particularly in its right-wing welfare-chauvinist strain, has supposedly been inexorably ascendant, as highlighted by the copious ink devoted by international media outlets to the successes of UKIP in Britain, Front National (FN; National Front) in France, Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV; Party for Freedom) in the Netherlands, and Sverigedemokraterna (SD; Sweden Democrats) in Sweden. Surprisingly, though, the story of Perussuomalaiset, a Finnish political party roughly analogous to such movements and a powerful rebuke to the notion that there is something inevitable in their rise, has been comparatively absent from this coverage.
Perussuomalaiset (PS), officially Anglicized as “the Finns Party” though “Ordinary Finns” is a better translation, was founded in 1995 from the remnants of earlier organizations, and spent most of its early years as a thoroughly marginal force, never holding more than five seats in Finland’s 200-strong legislature. Established Finnish parties embarked on a purposeful strategy of treating PS as though it didn’t exist. Following the parliamentary elections of 2011, which saw an explosion in support for PS and delivering the party an unexpected 39 seats, there was much debate between other political actors in Finland as to whether this policy of exclusion was still a viable path towards neutralizing PS. Ultimately, these actors decided to stay the course, and an unwieldy six-party “rainbow coalition” government was formed, excluding the PS. This strategy of disregard, however, failed to meaningfully diminish PS’s popularity among voters, and when Finland went to the polls again last April, a strong 17.7 percent showing left the party with a virtually unchanged delegation of 38, bringing it for the first time into a tripartite government. This electoral success also made PS leader Timo Soini Deputy Prime Minister.
So far, this story isn’t unfamiliar. Previously mentioned groups such as UKIP, FN, PVV and SD have followed comparable trajectories in their respective countries. However, over the second half of 2015, support for Soini’s party declined precipitously. In December 2015, polling suggested Soini’s party ranked fifth in popularity with a dismal 8.9 percent, a far cry from its second-place finish in the April elections.
This rapid decline raises numerous questions. Why, in an era of European politics many believe already belongs to the likes of Geert Wilders and Marine le Pen, are their Finnish counterparts in retreat? Is there some idiosyncratic challenge facing PS that isn’t affecting its more successful sister parties? It doesn’t appear so — PS suffers neither from a charisma deficit (Soini is generally perceived as a very effective and inspiring campaigner) nor from accusations of right-wing radicalism (indeed, the Finnish party, whose roots lie more in Euroscepticism than opposition to immigration, strikes a more moderate note than its European counterparts). So, why is Finland breaking the mold? Furthermore, does the case of Finland hold valuable lessons for ongoing efforts to stem the rising tide of chauvinism in Europe?
Former Finnish parliament member Risto Penttilä frames the question as a simple dichotomy between engagement and isolation. For purposes of comparison, he cites Sweden, where the 2014 success of the far-right SD deprived the center-left and center-right blocs of a majority in parliament. The moderate parties responded by promulgating a doctrine known as the “December Agreement.” Under the agreement, the center-left and center-right decided that whichever held a majority would be allowed by the other to form a minority government, with the other side committing to abstain on the necessary budgetary votes. Like the Finnish responses to PS pre-2015, the agreement was effectively a cordon sanitaire – an attempt to completely isolate the populists by allowing minority governments of either the left or the right to hold office, thereby removing any need to engage with SD. The hope was that by depriving SD of any parliamentary power, the other parties would also ultimately deprive them of electoral support.
By all accounts, this plan was catastrophically unsuccessful — the establishment’s agreement itself quickly collapsed, many voters perceived the whole exercise as undemocratic chicanery, and SD’s polling rose even higher than their record 12.9 percent electoral result, with some later polls showing their support to have passed 20 percent. For Penttilä, the Swedish example demonstrates conclusively that attempts to isolate right-populist political elements only make them stronger, whereas the Finnish case shows the merit of engaging with such groups even to the extent of including them in government. Including parties like PS in government, he argues, will, over the long-term, reduce their influence as their electoral appeal is predicated upon being strong-willed outsiders who don’t have to demonstrate the pragmatism and ability to compromise that actual governance requires.
Penttilä’s claim that efforts to completely isolate right-populist parties in Europe have almost without exception failed is correct — from Sweden to Finland’s experience with PS pre-2015 to other examples like the Netherlands. If his assertion that short-term engagement with such parties leads to a long-term decline in their support were also accurate, then it would be reasonable to expect many establishment actors adopting this strategy. Obviously, including such entities within the government runs the risk of yielding them significant influence over policy, but if Penttilä’s strategy were proven to work, the long-term trade-off could easily be considered “worth it.”
The trouble is, there isn’t substantial empirical evidence for the idea that the far-right will tend to be the agent of its own destruction once it shifts from an opposition role to government. It is true that PS’s support fell drastically after its inclusion in government, yet this hasn’t always been the case when a right-populist group has gained access to government. The Freedom Party of Austria, an archetypally right-populist party (so much so that it has come under fire for statements such as “too many foreigners does no one any good”) was in government in a two-party coalition with the conservative Österreichische Volkspartei (ÖVP; Austrian People’s Party) from 2000 to 2005. Although the FPÖ temporarily lost a little bit of ground during that period, partially because its former leader broke off from the group and started his own party, its long-term viability as a political force in no way suffered. Indeed, as Austria heads towards new elections in 2018, current polling puts the FPÖ in position to blow every other party out of the water and become the largest party by a double-digit margin.
Similarly, the right-populist Dansk Folkeparti (DF; Danish People’s Party) has, since June, been in a quasi-governmental position in Denmark, providing outside parliamentary support to the conservative government of Lars Løkke Rasmussen. In this time, it has seen its popular support increase. In short, Penttilä’s assumption that engaging with right-populist parties will lead to their long-term decline, as exemplified by the current Finnish situation, isn’t universally correct. Voters seem able to distinguish between the component parties of a coalition government and have previously been willing to continue their support for right-populist elements within governing administrations, overlooking supposed failings of governance (for example, PS being unable to convince its coalition partners to fully adopt its immigration policies) as regretful but necessary instances of “acquiescence” to “establishment politics.”
If engagement itself cannot explain PS’s decline, then what is to be made of it? One answer could be to reframe the question. Penttilä’s analysis is fundamentally dichotomous — a binary between active engagement (government inclusion) and what can be termed “unconventional political competition” (cordons sanitaire and all other hostile attempts at marginalization). However, it can sensibly be argued that Penttilä’s dichotomy is a false one. European parties faced with surging right-wing populists have a third option — conventional political competition. Instead of actively including the insurgent party in government-formation decisions, or moving heaven and earth to try to exclude it from the political arena, this third option involves, for example, painting the newcomers as untrustworthy and manipulative or aggressively confronting them in televised debates and op-eds. In other words, doing what parties and candidates have always done in the name of healthy political competition — albeit with higher stakes.
When Finland, Sweden, Austria, and other cases are taken in sum, it becomes clear that neither absolute exclusion nor inclusion has been consistently effective in containing right-populist parties. This conclusion implies that conventional political competition is, in a very real sense, a fundamentally rational response. That is to say, there is no reason why partisan political competition should be profoundly different in the era of populist insurgencies. Rather, it’s quite logical to expect political competition to remain, as it always has, essential to maintaining a certain neutralizing unpredictability in the political game.
The Finnish experience in the global context suggests that political forces opposing right-populist movements should neither seek to isolate them nor bring them into government, but rather to fight them in more conventional ways. As Europe’s establishment parties nervously watch the chauvinists’ poll numbers rise, this is something they would do well to keep in mind. If they wish to neutralize, or at least mitigate, this threat, they should not shy away from taking the newcomers head-on in conventional political struggle, remaining ever-vigilant for exploitable weaknesses in their opponents. Though this old political strategy may not yield immediate results, it holds the only realistic potential for long-term success. It also holds a message for the European political establishment: Stop trying to pinch yourself in the hopes of waking up from a dream in which the waking world’s normal laws of politics don’t apply. You are already awake. They do apply.