While foreigners make up only 3.1 per cent of Finland’s population, immigration has played a central role in the campaign ahead of today’s elections, illustrated by the spectacular rise of the once tiny nationalist True Finns.
The National Coalition party, a pro-immigration junior member of the current centre-right govern-ment, has been seen leading a tight pack of four parties in recent polls, garnering 21.2 per cent of voter intentions in the latest survey.
“We really need immigrants to take care of our society,” Housing Minister Jan Vapaavuori, of the National Coalition, told AFP, stressing Finland will soon suffer a labour shortage due to its rapidly aging population.
“Only Japan is aging faster in the world than Finland. We have more people leaving on pensions than young people coming to work. In the next 15 years it will be a problem” unless something changes, he lamented.
And yet it is the True Finns, with their slogan ‘Finns First’ who have dominated this year’s campaign as they have catapulted from a mere 4.1 per cent of votes in the 2007 elections to around 18 per cent of polled voter intentions in recent months.
The populist party, led by charismatic Timo Soini, has in recent weeks seen its support dip slightly to 15.4 per cent in the latest survey, but the predicted influx of True Finns MPs means parliament will lurch right no matter what.
The leftwing opposition Social Democrats have lost many of their traditional, working class voters wooed by the True Finns, and in an attempt to stop the haemorrhaging have themselves adopted similar rhetoric as the right-wing party, including a more sceptical line on immigration.
Rising anti-immigrant sentiment in Finland has also inspired a record number of immigrants to run in today’s elections.
“Every time Finland’s economy is doing badly, people look for a scapegoat, and immigrants are a group of people who aren’t able to defend themselves so well,” Somali-born Finn Zahra Abdulla told AFP while campaigning for the Green Party.
Abdulla is one of 45 candidates of immigrant origin in the running – nearly double the number from the last elections in 2007 when she narrowly lost a parliamentary seat that would have made her Finland’s first black MP.