Finland’s populist party has cracked in two

WHATEVER their faults, Finland’s politicians cannot be accused of sluggishness: the biggest Finnish political crisis in years has been wrapped up in just four days. The selection on June 10th of a new far-right leader, Jussi Halla-aho, by the populist Finns Party (formerly known in English as the True Finns, a more accurate translation of its Finnish name) threw the party into turmoil, and ended up splitting it down the middle. On June 13th 20 MPs, about half of the party’s total, announced they had formed a new faction in parliament. The group calls itself the New Alternative, and includes the Finns Party’s previous head, Timo Soini, and most of its senior leadership. The affair will have little impact on the governing coalition, of which the Finns Party had been a member. Yet it may affect the debate over how Europe’s mainstream parties cope with its new populist ones.

The cracks in the Finns Party started to appear in March, when Mr Soini, who helped found it and has been its head since 1997, decided to step down. The party has always taken a socially conservative, eurosceptic and anti-immigrant line. But in recent years Mr Soini had tried to nudge it towards the mainstream. After the party came a joint second in parliamentary elections in 2015, Mr Soini joined the governing coalition, led by the Centre Party under Juha Sipila as prime minister (with the centre-right National Coalition party as the other junior partner). Their government proceeded to finalise legislation on gay marriage, sign off on the latest Greek bail-out and accept refugees from Syria and Iraq, all measures which the Finns Party had opposed in the past.

The Finns Party’s new-found reasonableness was seen by many as evidence that one way to tame Europe’s new populist parties is to include them in government, forcing them to accept a measure of responsibility. But within the party, tensions between the moderates and the old hard core were growing, and the leadership contest laid them bare. Sampo Terho, the European affairs minister, was seen as Mr Soini’s preferred successor, and planned to follow similarly conciliatory policies. Mr Halla-aho, by contrast, ran an outrageously bumptious campaign in the mode of Donald Trump. He refused to distance himself from his past inflammatory writings, which used racial slurs and called Islam a religion of paedophilia. (He was convicted of incitement to hatred for that statement.) Despite, or because of, such provocations, Mr Halla-aho won 949 votes to Mr Terho’s 629.

After Mr Halla-aho’s victory on June 10th, Mr Sipila and Petteri Orpo, the finance minister and head of the National Coalition party, expressed doubts that the government could continue. Many expected a reshuffling of the coalition or snap elections. On June 13th Mr Sipila was on his way to the president’s summer residence in Naantali to tender the government’s resignation when he was informed of the splinter group’s formation. He declared that there was no need to resign after all and returned to Helsinki.

By that evening Mr Sipila, Mr Orpo and Mr Terho were announcing that they planned to continue with the government’s previous agenda. With the splinter group, the government still has a comfortable majority of 106 in the 200-seat parliament. Mr Halla-aho could do little but complain of the “unbelievable trick” his party comrades had pulled on him.

For now Finland has returned to stability. Polls show the Finns Party lost support after entering government, falling from 17% before the elections in 2015 to 9% this May. For many European centrists, this confirmed that populists can be defanged by bringing them into government. The hiving off of the party’s moderate wing could be seen as yet more evidence. But Mr Halla-aho may now be able to re-establish support for his rump party and its extreme positions. And for populists who were thinking of joining coalitions, the Finns Party’s story may be a warning: best preserve your authenticity, and stay on the fringe.