Labour market inclusion more important than learning Finnish

Finland started the summer with a ‘mini government crisis’. The leaders of the Centre Party and the National Coalition Party announced they could not cooperate with the Finns Party’s newly elected leader, the MEP Jussi Halla-aho, because of unbridgeable value differences. The two party leaders underlined the government programme’s sustainable principles like human rights and the rule of law, as opposed to hate rhetoric or discrimination. 

This was solved the next day when 20 of the Finns Party’s 35 MPs left their parliamentary group, among them Timo Soini who was leaving the leadership post after 20 years. The group’s four other government ministers have also left their parliamentary group and have been excluded from the Finns Party. The new group is called ‘Blue Reform’.

As a result, Prime Minister Juha Sipilä decided the government did not have to resign but could carry on as before, among them Jari Lindström as Minister of Labour (although he had to resign the justice portfolio in May because he was nearly burnt out). The government programme has not been changed. Many Finnish commentators have expressed surprise that things like the stricter immigration policy, which was negotiated by Jussi Halla-aho, have been left in place.

When the leader of the National Coalition Party Petteri Orpo proposed to increase the annual quota of refugees by 300 to 1,050 (in reality taking it back to what it once used to be), the coalition partner Blue Reform immediately refused. “We have not agreed this in the government programme.”