Special thanks to ST and Timmy for dedicating your time to writing this post 🌸.
Have you ever wondered what the Finnish political landscape consists of? Vietnam is a one-party system, where the Communist Party of Vietnam rules the nation. Finland is a parliamentary representative democracy. The Finnish parliament sets legislation, and its members are chosen through a democratic voting process that utilizes something called the D’Hondt voting method every four years.
The Vietnamese political landscape is much more narrow than that of Finland, and from a Finnish point of view, the Vietnamese government looks quite authoritarian and far-left. For this post, I will be going through all the major political parties in Finland, and give an extremely simplified explanation about what they represent and what kind of change they are fighting for. Any explanation of politics will always be quite biased, but I have tried to remain at least somewhat neutral!
These are the current parties in the parliament. The order of popularity based on the latest polling by Yle:
SDP (Social Democratic Party)
Kokoomus (National Coalition Party)
Perussuomalaiset (Finns Party, previously known as True Finns)
Keskusta (Centre Party)
Vasemmistoliitto (Left Alliance)
Vihreät (Green Party)
KD (Christian Democrats)
RKP (Swedish People’s Party)
Liike Nyt (Movement Now)
The last election was really controversial, and Finland ended up with the most right-wing government it has had in maybe a hundred years, resulting in many strikes and quite extreme cuts to social welfare. From the polling, you can see how the popularity of the major parties has changed after the government rose to power.
SDP
Currently the most popular party, with 21.7% of the population backing it. Politically center-left, the typical voter of this party is middle-aged or older, most likely female, with some amount of university-level education.
The party was originally founded as the Workers’ Party of Finland in 1899 and helped advocate for worker’s rights and the 8-hour work day. Back then the party was much more socialist than now–the current iteration of the party is advocating incremental change, freedom, equality, and solidarity.
SDP pretty much encapsulates what people imagine when they think about Finnish politics.
Kokoomus
The National Coalition considers itself to be the party of civility and has the most consistently right-wing identifying voter base. Most Finnish presidents have been from Kokoomus. Currently, they enjoy 20.6% backing. They used to be a center-right party, but now reside more strongly to the right. Their typical voter is male, middle-aged or older, middle-class or wealthier, with some amount of university-level education.
The current president Alexander Stubb, and the current prime minister Petteri Orpo are both from Kokoomus.
The most important values for Kokoomus are democracy and liberalism, especially economic liberalism. When it comes to social issues, Kokoomus has both socially liberal members, but also a growing socially conservative wing. Kokoomus differs from many other right-wing parties internationally for their generally positive attitude towards immigration, although some tend to view this as a cynical bourgeoisie strategizing.
The new government is formed by Kokoomus, Perussuomalaiset, RKP, and KD. Some older Kokoomus members have expressed dissatisfaction with Kokoomus for collaborating with the controversial Perussuomalaiset party, saying that Kokoomus is failing to represent the values of civility and sophistication.
Perussuomalaiset
Perussuomalaiset is the anti-immigration, radical right-wing party. It is difficult to describe PS politically since the only consistent values they advocate for are being against immigration, and being against progressives. Based on a statistical analysis done on a question bank of polling questions, if you look at their policies outside the immigration question there isn’t much coherence in what their members stand for, but when it comes to immigration or social issues they are strong rights, and strongly conservative. A typical PS voter is between the ages 20 and 50, almost exclusively male, poor to middle-class, with rarely any university-level education. The party currently enjoys 17.4% backing.
The current iteration of PS was born in 2017 when the internal tensions between the more extreme anti-foreigner side and the side that is also concerned with other issues grew impossible. The head of the old PS, Timo Soini, formed his own party (Siniset, Korjausliike), taking many of the old-fashioned PS people with him. It turns out that PS voters for the most part didn’t care about any other issues apart from foreigners, so Siniset quickly died and the new PS could focus almost exclusively on anti-immigration. If you follow American politics, imagine the Donald Trump style, populist side of Republicans and you aren’t too far off. In some years, PS has not even released a party platform document, where they detail the exact policies and changes they’d like to see, since that isn’t really necessary for PS voters.
It is difficult to write about PS since they don’t really have a clear political ideology, and sometimes if you say bad things about PS, their fans might attack you or organize targeted harassment campaigns against you… It is pretty scary. This party really thrives on controversy, and often their decisions appear to optimize for offending their political opponents. This can be done by tolerating members that collaborate with neo-nazi groups, recruiting politicians that have been fired from other parties for crimes or sexual harassment and nominating them for high positions, or by just creating misinformation-filled campaigns on Tiktok. Luckily, most Finnish politics is very matter-of-fact and civilized!
Stay tuned for part 2!
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