The Aloof Election Manifesto: <i>Radical Political Right in Finland in the Borderlines of Neoliberalism and Cultural Nativism</i>

Abstract

The rise of the populist radical political right is one of the significant phenomena in recent European party politics. In this article, I examine the ideology of the radical right in Finland by analysing the Aloof Election Manifesto, an election platform published by radical wing of the Finns Party for national parliament elections 2011. The analysis shows that the ideology challenges traditional notions of nationalism. It combines cultural nativism, secularism and economic neoliberalism to the fear of Islam and multiculturalism.

Social Media and the Emergence, Establishment and Transformation of the Right-Wing Populist Finns Party

“…Thus, the anti-immigration movement does not seem to be "epistemologically populist", defined as a reliance on folk wisdom and eschewing expert knowledge (Saurette and Gunster 2011) -so central are appeals to factual evidence and the expert position of Jussi Halla-aho in the movement's discourse. In fact, this type of empiricist and counter-expert argumentation seems to be typical of the Finnish online populist right (Mäkinen 2016;Nykänen 2016;Sakki and Pettersson 2016;Saresma 2014), and sharply divides it stylistically from the Finns Party's previously dominant, 'folksy' agrarian-populist wing. Whether this mode of argumentation is at least partly a result of the fact that this movement was born online, or simply a result of the ideology of the movement being compatible with such a style, would require further empirical research -although there are hints that "discussion forum politics" indeed favours a type of "scientistic" argumentation overly reliant on citable and measurable "facts" about complex issues of moral values and political ideologies (Ylä-Anttila 2018).…”