Still Day 9.

Alright. So, it was a late night last night and an early morning, and I’m already a bit weary with this whole thing but I feel it’s my civic duty to use my modest platform and my far less modest words to talk about this.

Finland had a parliamentary election yesterday. These are pretty important, certainly more important than the presidential elections even if I still consider them little more than a good way of keeping a few hundred dangerously over-enthusiastic unemployed people off the streets.

It could have gone really badly. We have a far-right populist party of our own over here, which is pretty much what it sounds like. They’re anti-immigration, anti-Muslim, EU-sceptical and basically they’re giant worthless shits and I’m going on the record and saying #YesAllPerssut. If you carry the PerusSuomalainen flag, you are doing it because you’re racist. I don’t care if that doesn’t help. Nothing helps. And I don’t care if that drives undecideds into the Perssut’s arms. They wanted to go there anyway because they’re fucking racists.

So let’s make that clear. These guys were handing out keyrings made out of imitation bullets the day before the election, with the explanation, “these were used as a solution to immigration once before.”

Hearsay from Greens candidate Niko Mikkonen, but I didn’t find any direct refutation. Only comments from Perssut saying “right on, finally someone with the courage to suggest a real [indeed, final?] solution.”

And these are the guys who could have won yesterday.

And they nearly, nearly did.

So how it rolled out in the end was that none of the parties involved got a decisive majority, and by that I mean it seems like none of them even topped 20% of the vote. Which is fine, it’s all good, it’s what multiple party democracy should look like. The two leaders right to the final count were the Social Democrats and the Perssut. And there was a one-seat margin in it, right down to the wire.

Long story short, our team won.

My politically savvy summary.

If the Perssut had won, they would have had to form a coalition party with the same old centre-right goombahs who are too gutless to do anything useful, and we would have had four more years of the same quiet erosion of public services and very vocal demonisation of foreigners and environmental protections.

Now … now I’m not sure what happens. I very sincerely hope the SDP don’t agree to form a government with the Hitler Lite / Trump Less-Orange party, and I also hope that they do form a coalition with the other big growers in the parliament – specifically the Greens and the Left Alliance. But who knows what they’ll do?

I would even be happy if they decided to bring the Greens and the Centre Party (Kesk.) into a new government. I know, Keskusta lost big here and it’s part of the reason all the seats-gained and votes-attained stats are out of whack, we’ll get to that. But the thing is, they got hammered because they’re the stodgy-arse establishment party that just stays the course and actually does stuff. Sometimes it’s not great stuff. But the problem is, as I have already seen pointed out in a few places, they took the fall for all the dumb shit their coalition fuck-buddies made happen.

The problem with a coalition made up of establishment centrists and centre-right and far-right populists is, when shit goes bad the establishment takes the hit, and the populists just keep populistin’. Because blaming someone else and claiming to be the real victim is basically their entire fucking handbook.

The Perssut didn’t take much of a hit, because they are rubber and everyone else is glue.

And now we get to the really fun part, which is how this seems to be getting handled in the media.

It should surprise precisely none of you who have seen my posts about the anti-Nazi protests and their coverage (300 Nazis march, 4,000 people march in opposition to Nazis, and the news reports that several hundred people marched to show unity between a number of different right-wing groups of diverse geographical and cultural backgrounds, while a counter-protest involving leftists, anarchists and students was held somewhere, involving a certain number of protesters, and I’m not even exaggerating this shit), that this is somehow a victory for the Perssut.

No, I don’t get it.

I didn’t have it in me to go through all the toxic and shameless non-journalism involved, but I did spend some time and effort on at least one of the semi-legitimate ones, in Helsingin Sanomat.

It’s all in Finnish but basically it says that SDP won by an extremely narrow margin against Kok and PS, and here’s what four experts had to say about what this historically close result means.

I want to point out the very framing of this article is set in the first paragraph:

SDP piti täpärästi kiinni ykkössijasta ja nousi eduskuntavaalien suurimmaksi puolueeksi. Perussuomalaiset kiri hurjalla vaalipäivän äänimäärällä toiselle sijalle.

Translation: SDP barely managed to achieve first place in terms of parliament seats. The Perssut, by encouraging a huge voter turnout, achieved second place.

See, right from the start, they’re hand-waving aside who actually won (with a huge gain in seats, by the way) and talking up the second place getters (with a tiny increase in seats, and an overall actual drop in votes, as I get into below). Which is … why? Why are they doing this?

I mean, it seems pretty obvious to me that they have an agenda that is not served by populists becoming less popular. Or by Socialist Democrats becoming more popular.

And their experts are all hand-picked to provide justification for this opening.

Jukka Manninen is a former Kokoomus chief of planning, and Kokoomus willingly sleep with Perssut so fuck his credentials.

His statement: Sdp:n tulos on sen historian toiseksi huonoin. Vihreillä ei tullut läpimurtoa. – basically he says that SDP’s result here is its second-worst in history (they still made huge fucking gains and fucking won, dickhead). And that the Greens didn’t get the breakthrough they wanted (looks pretty fucking good to me and I hope they become part of the coalition just to tip you on your arse). So yeah. Next.

Karina Jutila’s background seems more solid but she says that this result is the death knell of three parties, including SDP. Well not in the next four years. That smells off to me. But okay, let’s see if SDP manages to turn it around, their results could have been better and from what I hear they ran into some drawbacks in the final weeks of their campaign. So watch this space.

Kestilä-Kekkonen’s statement was meh. No kidding we’re getting more polarised and tribal in our voting. Doesn’t seem to be much we can do about that, when these are the flavours we’re being offered.

And Majander’s point about people protest-voting for the Perssut because of alienation by the left … no. Just no. Stop that already, it’s so 2016. If you’re somehow managing to be alienated by the fuzzy-wuzzies, who love and accept everything … no, you wanted to vote racist all along and this is your chance to attempt to justify it. Fuck you and your excuses and your whining. I’ve reflected on the pushing-them-into-the-Fascists’-arms phenomenon before, and of course it’s a significant issue. But I hope at this point anyone who was going to be triggered into voting white supremacist is already there and is starting to come to terms with it and be honest about their own ideologies and personalities, and we can stop worrying about it.

If you’re there, you’re there. Along with the rest of the precious patriotic snowflakes. Like I said, I’m a better Finn than all of you put together.

On the other hand, Majander is former SDP so there’s his agenda, if you want to look at it that way.

Which brings us to the facts. And the facts are, when you shake out the numbers, the SDP, Greens and Left Alliance all got a sizeable bump in terms of voters. The Keskusta party took a huge hit. And Kokoomus and the Perssut also took a hit. Not a huge one, certainly not as much as I would have liked, but their parliamentary seat gains were purely a reflection of that huge chunk cut out of Keskusta.

They lost votes. They’ve lost popularity. And I don’t care if Hitler Lite / Trump Less-Orange got more votes as a single candidate. He is what he is and his followers are what they are. Racists, or racist sheep.

– Still in carpark.