Tag: conservative

5 things we already know about Finland’s new right-wing government

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From tax cuts to climate change, increased VAT to Finland’s international reputation, here’s some key things you should know.

The setting and symbolism couldn’t have been more striking, or more different. 

After the 2019 Finnish election, the parties of the new coalition government presented their policy programme in Helsinki’s spectacular Oodi Central Library in the morning over coffee, and took questions from the public and journalists alike — before embarking on a tour of town halls up and down the country to have conversations with voters about the future direction of Finland. 

Compare that with 2023, when the four parties which make up Finland’s new coalition government summoned journalists at 6pm on a Friday evening, no members of the public allowed, to unveil their policy agenda — which came after seven weeks of fractious negotiations.

The right-wing National Coalition Party, known locally as Kokoomus, emerged from the April general election with the most seats in parliament, and partnered with the next biggest group, the far-right Finns Party. Also on board are the Christian Democrats and the Swedish People’s Party, with Kokoomus leader Petteri Orpo as Finland’s next prime minister. 

So what are some of the key things we know already about the new government programme, and how might it all unfold now: 

1. This is the most right-wing Finnish government in modern times

Kokoomus has a vocal EU-sceptic and immigrant-sceptic wing. The Christian Democrats’ best-known MP is anti-abortion, and became something of a cause celebre among the US Christian right when she carried a bible into court to face charges of being anti-LGBT. She was later cleared. 

Meanwhile, the Finns Party’s track record on immigration, the EU and fighting the climate crisis speaks for itself. 

There are also several Finns Party MPs, including senior party members, with convictions for race-related crimes, and the younger cadre of Finns Party politicians who came to prominence during the last two election cycles have a fondness for Donald Trump’s MAGA movement. 

“Petteri Orpo’s government programme is building a European, free and secure Finland that will not just sit on its hands,” insists Kokoomus MP Elina Valtonen, who is likely to land one of the big ministerial portfolios in the new government.

“A strong and caring NATO Finland, where consumer choice increases, entrepreneurship pays, skills are valued, living standards rise and nature is cared for,” she adds. 

But political analyst Juho Rahkonen says “we have a more right-wing government than perhaps ever before,” a stark contrast to outgoing Prime Minister Sanna Marin’s five-party center-left coalition.

Finns Party leader Riikka Purra said the Nordic nation should opt for a tougher immigration line, and called for stricter asylum policy, time-limited protection of asylum-seekers, mandatory integration, and plans to reduce the number of quota refugees, saying those policies would amount to “a paradigm shift.”

2. The Swedish People’s Party is taking a reputational gamble

No party has more at stake in this coalition government than the Swedish People’s Party SFP/RKP. 

With ten seats in parliament, they are the only party which was also in the previous government — an administration which put intersectional feminism at the heart of policymaking with Sanna Marin as prime minister.

Over the last four years they’ve moved further to the left on issues of internationality, multi-culturalism, human rights and immigration — an anathema to the Finnish right-wing.  

Before negotiations, SFP/RKP leader Anna-Maja Henriksson said she wouldn’t be in the government if it was doing Finns Party politics, but she seems to have capitulated and it’s difficult to see at this stage what she has actually won for her party — except perhaps to prolong Finland’s widely-criticised fur farming industry, which employs around two thousand people, many of them in her own constituency area. 

For a party that’s already divided between it’s Ostrobothnia ‘countryside’ voters and the southern coastal ‘city’ voters, the Swedish People’s Party might have lost the chance to appeal to other non-Swedish-speaking Finns, immigrants and young people as potential voters, by joining up with a far-right party in government — indeed their own youth group leadership quit the government formation talks in protest at cooperation with the Finns Party, and Henriksson admitted on Friday that still not all her MPs were in favour of being in government with them.  

3. Four billion in savings needed

Petteri Orpo promised to find €4 billion in savings to reduce Finland’s debt, and that means a mixture of cuts — which are never popular with the people on the receiving end — and cost savings or fundraising in the form of increasing items with a 10% VAT to 14%, making it even more expensive to buy medicines, take part in sports, go to the cinema or cultural events, or book a hotel room. 

“Before the elections, we promised to put the country’s affairs in order. We promised an adjustment of €6 billion and 100,000 new jobs,” says Kokoomus MP Sinuhe Wallinheimo. 

Most of the savings are coming from €1.5 billion cuts to social security, and by re-jigging how regional healthcare systems are funded from the central government to generate efficiency savings. 

There will be freezes for the next four years on earnings-related unemployment insurance, housing allowance and some other benefits. 

There’s cuts of €125 million for education and culture grants, and an adult education subsidy will also be scrapped. Some €250 million will be cut from funding for new roads projects and another €250 million from development aid budgets. 

Tax on beer will decrease, but taxes on wines, spirits and soft drinks will go up. 

“There is enough money for investors and high earners, but poor families with children, students and the elderly are being cut,” says Jussi Saramo, chair of the Left Alliance Parliamentary Group. 

“For example, massive housing benefit cuts will hit students, single parents and those working in low-wage jobs hard,” he says. 

4. Fighting the climate crisis

The previous Finnish government were enthusiastic about setting targets to meet and even exceed international agreements on carbon emissions – even if they were less enthusiastic about taking enough concrete steps to meet those goals fast enough. 

Within the new government, the Finns Party has been opposed to the idea that Finns — who they say are among the least polluting people on the planet — should have to take radical steps to fight the climate crisis when this should be done by big polluting countries instead. 

They’ve also wanted to lower the price of petrol and resisted calls to reduce the number of petrol cars on Finnish roads. 

“The new government is very much leaning towards the conservative right and takes Finland backwards when it comes to climate action and biodiversity protection,” says Ville Niinistö, a Finnish Green MEP. 

“The financing for nature protection is reduced by one-third from the previous Marin government and therefore we have no tools to protect our forests and waterways in line with global commitments to stop biodiversity loss,” he tells Euronews. 

Niinistö notes that while the new government doesn’t formally back down on the commitment to be carbon neutral by 2035, its policies are “leading away from that goal”. 

The new government plans to reduce tax on petrol by €100 million, and reduce vehicle taxes by €50 million. 

5. Finland’s international reputation could take a hit

In large part thanks to Sanna Marin’s profile, Finland has enjoyed unprecedented good press internationally over the last four years. 

From being the happiest country in the world to putting extra money into development aid for women and children when the Trump administration withdrew support, Finland has shored up its credentials as a reliable partner. 

But now there will be cuts to international aid, amounting to hundreds of millions of euros. Finland will also be less welcoming to asylum seekers and so-called ‘quota migrants.’  

And having a far-right party in power probably doesn’t do a lot to burnish Finland’s brand image as a friendly, welcoming country. 

Kokoomus MP Saara-Sofia Sirén says that in the new government programme, Finland “promotes the rights of women and girls across its foreign policy.” 

“The priorities of the government’s development policy are strengthening the status of women and girls, the right to self-determination, and sexual and reproductive health,” but doesn’t address whether budget cuts to international aid will impact the scope or scale of the services which Finland currently funds.



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Fintan O’Toole on his bestselling book and the transformation of Ireland

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It’s possible over the course of just one lifetime to see the world you’ve grown up in and all of its certainties stood on their head. That happened to the generation that grew up in the 1960s in Ireland in a social climate that’s now as lost as Atlantis. 

In “We Don’t Know Ourselves, A Personal History Of Modern Ireland,” journalist Fintan O’Toole has taken a flinty-eyed and often funny look at the transformation of our nation from one time conservative theocracy to its first in the world vote for equal marriage.

Last week, he spoke to journalists in New York City about its unexpected bestseller success in America and the lessons it carries.

2Gallery

“We Don’t Know Ourselves” by Fintan O’Toole. (Liveright Publishers)

In his look at the changes that have marked our transformation from paranoid post-colonial theocracy to progressive European trailblazer, O’Toole has lived the changes he writes about.

Beginning his talk to a gathering of invited New York Irish journalists on April 24, O’Toole spoke the two words that haunted his childhood and the childhoods of many around him: Letterfrack and Daingean.

These were the names of the two most feared Industrial Schools in Ireland, the ones that “bad boys” were sent to for terrible crimes like stealing a loaf of bread.

Between the years 1940 to 1970, 147 children reportedly died in Letterfrack in Connemara while in the “care” of the Christian Brothers. There was evidence of acute physical and sexual abuse there going back to the 1930s. 

In Daingean, a similar reign of terror prevailed, with flogging and other physical abuse creating an atmosphere of horror that has haunted many who passed through it for life. 

“I wondered how did I know those two words?” he told the journalists. “I don’t remember anyone saying Letterfrack or Daingean to me very often but they were everywhere – and yet nowhere.

“When Mary Raftery – who is probably the greatest journalist of our times – did three documentary films about the industrial schools in 1999 called ‘States Of Fear,’ I remember everyone was shocked and appalled. Yet everyone knew.”

That weird cognitive dissonance, that ability to hold two conflicting pieces of information at once, to know and not know, was the origin of his best-selling book. And the study was not simply academic, it was part of his own family life, he says.

“My father had a broken skull and we have different stories about how he got it.

“It was only quite late on that I got the real story, which was that his stepfather had thrown him down the stairs. He was a brute and so the question was, why did his mother – my grandmother – stay with him?

“And the answer was she married him because it was the only way to keep the kids out of the industrial schools. And she knew it was worse, you know, that the worst thing was having your kids being taken into these institutions.

“That’s a very dark way of talking about this sort of doubleness, where lots of people were highly aware of the way that parts of Irish society worked. But we had this extraordinary capacity not to recognize it.”

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In the decade of his birth, the country was floundering. “There were only two countries in Europe that lost population in the 1950s,” O’Toole said. “One was East Germany and the other one was Ireland. The population was just leaving, young people were leaving in droves.

“And they were leaving to go back to the old colonial oppressor. They were choosing to live in England. All my father’s family, his siblings were in England, all my cousins were living in Birmingham and London.”

‘Island for lease, current owners leaving,’ ran a poignant cartoon that caught the eye of T.K. Whitaker, the gifted Irish economist and Secretary of the Department of Finance.

“He was in his late 30s from Rostrevor in the north,” said O’Toole. “He was an Irish speaker and devout Catholic, and he had come to live and work in the Republic because he believed in Irish nationalism, he wasn’t a rebel.

“But he realized that in order for things to stay the same, things would have to change. That really was the ironic T.K. Whitaker idea, that in order to keep Catholic nationalist Ireland, we’ve had to change how our society operated radically.” 

Ireland would have to open up to foreign capital and it would have to attract private capital, Whitaker wrote.

“I think Whitaker thought, you could do it and it wouldn’t really change Catholicism, it wouldn’t really change the structure of governing and theology the way it was.

“And in fact, Catholicism still did pretty well in terms of its control of the society, right up to the end of the 20th century.

“And then it collapses with extraordinary intensity. I’m not talking about Catholicism as a faith, I’m talking about this peculiar fusion of Catholicism and nationalism as a governing ideology. But when it went it went with astonishing rapidity.”

Albania got state television before Ireland did, O’Toole notes. “The Irish government didn’t want to do television, but they had to because more and more people would be putting up huge ariels and getting the BBC. So London finally forced them into having a TV station to stop people being influenced by BBC.

“And of course, it was opened by the Archbishop of Dublin and it was headed by [Edward Roth] an Irish American, some good Catholic boy from Boston, who was the first director of programs and all he could do was buy programs from ABC and the entire back catalog of NBC and ABC.

“So we started watching American kids college programs and this huge American cultural influence started coming in.”

The great challenge before us in 2023 is how to deal with the unexpectedly promising path ahead that nothing in our past has prepared us for.

“There is always an urge to fill it with stupid slogans or populism,” O’Toole said. “But if instead you can live with uncertainty, and you’re not susceptible to every demographic who wants to tell you they know the future, and can control the future, we will be okay.

“I think, by and large, Ireland has gotten to a point where actually there is more comfort with that uncertainty.”

O’Toole concluded: “There was a big international survey a couple of years ago that asked people would you like your country to be the way it used to be? And the two countries who said no were China and Ireland.

“We may be very sentimental but we’re not nostalgic. That will save us from the kind of populism we have seen elsewhere.”

“We Don’t Know Ourselves, A Personal History Of Modern Ireland” is published by Liveright, $32.00.



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NY Mag senior writer explains how ‘parental rights movement’ is so dangerous to kids and democracy

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Apparently we missed this little gem from New York Magazine’s Sarah Jones over the weekend. And we’re worse off for it, because it was actually an impressive display of weapons-grade insanity with a healthy dose of projection.

You’re gonna love this, you guys:

Jones writes:

State laws passed by conservative Republicans have made LGBTQ children in particular more vulnerable to abuse at home by practically requiring schools to out them to their parents. The denial of gender-affirming care is another act of violence. Far-right activists invent tales of wanton surgeries on minors and irreversible hormonal treatments. In doing so, they obscure the high suicide rate among LGBT youth who need gender-affirming care as a matter of life or death. Children who work may be exposed to adult dangers, like workplace injury or sexual harassment. In the home and at school, children must also fear gun violence in the name of the Second Amendment. Adults who encourage the proliferation of guns do so knowing well that children will die. In their hierarchy, the adult right to a gun is worth more than the child‘s right to live. Reduced to the level of a collectible or a beloved pet, the child is not a person to the right.

Only the unborn are spared the right’s cruelty. Conservatives claim personhood for the fetus, who cannot disobey and requires nothing but a womb. The fetus is more valuable than the child because the fetus is a means to an end: the subjugation of women. Once born, a child’s value depreciates. The parental right to “train” the child takes precedence over the child’s basic rights. There are ways to circumvent a child’s established right to an education, as conservatives know. Homeschooling laws are so lax in the U.S. that thousands of children have essentially disappeared into an academic void. Even if a child goes to public school, chronic underfunding deprives many children, especially in poor areas, of a sound education. In much of the country, trans youth aren’t treated like people with medical needs but political targets. This is ownership, and the U.S. rarely interferes. There is one exception to the right’s belief in absolute parental rule: trans-affirming parents. A defiant parent is a threat to the right. They’ve stepped out of place and must be subdued.

…

There is no way to control a child forever. My parents learned that much. I hid books from them and discovered different ways of thinking through literature and furtive online searching. In relatively short order, I became an atheist and a socialist, a fate so dire that a former trustee at my Evangelical college told me he hoped my parents died before they knew the truth. (They did not share his sentiment.) If my example means anything, it’s this: Children are not dogs to train but adults in formation. They will learn, someday soon, that the future belongs to them. What they do with that knowledge matters to everyone. Children aren’t private property, then, but a public responsibility. To expand our democratic project to children is to grant them the security the right seeks to deny them: education, health care, shelter, food. A better America begins with the child.

Isn’t that special?

Congratulations on making The List, Sarah. You’ve definitely earned your spot on it.

Sarah really, really doesn’t want parents to look out for and take care of their kids. Not when The State — and lefties like Sarah, of course — knows better.

Go on, Sarah. Just try it.

Yep.

Parents, don’t let your kids grow up to be Sarah Jones.

***

Related:

‘Please keep talking’! NY Mag’s Sarah Jones explains how the GOP is the party of far-Right ‘household tyrants’ who want a say in their kids’ educations

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Receipt-filled thread shows how YOUR tax dollars were used to blacklist (defund) conservative media

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Gosh, it sure sounds like the government doesn’t want you reading conservative news. Wonder why? As Twitchy readers know, the Washington Examiner broke a HUGE story late last week about a Microsoft-supported ad group working to deplatform and defund conservative sites; they were blacklisting us as a means to all but destroy our advertising revenue. They accused us of spreading disinformation and used descriptors like misogynists and hate, etc. They actually called Townhall Media ‘offensive and reprehensible’.

Meanwhile, they promoted sites like Buzzfeed and HuffPo.

Because of course, they did.

Now, it sounds like there are more dots to connect here … to the State Department. No, seriously.

Take a look at this thread from Walter Olson:

They targeted Reason Magazine, you guys.

Probably the most centrist, unbiased site around …

From Liberty Unyielding:

Conservative and libertarian-leaning media are now being starved of advertising dollars because of a taxpayer-funded progressive group — the Global Disinformation Index. It classifies truthful media coverage as “disinformation” that advertisers should avoid, when it is offensive to progressives. Most of the publications targeted by the Global Disinformation Index are conservative, but even non-conservative publications have been classified as misinformation after criticizing civil-liberties violations by progressive officials. That includes Reason Magazine, a libertarian publication that has won journalism awards for its reporting on civil-liberties violations and government abuses of power.

So basically any outlet not pushing government-approved Leftist garbage.

K.

London-based group.

This just gets dumber and more horrible by the minute.

From the Washington Examiner:

According to financial statements, the NED received over $300 million from the State Department in 2021. Critics have argued that the endowment, which Congress authorized in 1983, is essentially a government grantmaking body despite its legal status as a private entity.

In 2020, the NED granted $230,000 to the AN Foundation, GDI’s group that also goes by the Disinformation Index Foundation, documents show.

So … those of us in conservative media have been paying for these a-holes to try and defund/deplatform us.

No words.

… dynamic exclusion list.

How very Orwellian.

Basically, hate speech is anything the Left disagrees with.

Just. Wow.

In other words, Microsoft backpedaled and is trying to cover its backside.

PROPUBLICA. HA HA HA HA HA

But you know, we’re false and misleading.

You’ve gotta be kidding us.

This. ^

ALSO THIS^.

The government has no business whatsoever in funding any sort of action to silence the opinions of the media. We’re certainly not experts but this sounds a lot like a First Amendment thing.

See, you can tell he writes for Reason. His take is fair.

Meanwhile, this editor is ready to break out a chainsaw or two …

Right?

Since the government was involved?

Ain’t that the truth?

***

Related:

NPR DRAGGED (then dragged some more) for asking if we should continue masking FOREVER in some places

YIKES! We thought the NYT piece promoting mass suicide was bad but THIS Dick guy’s thread is even WORSE

AOC leads pack of frothy-mouthed Dems LOSING IT over Jesus Super Bowl ad (here are the dumbest)

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