Politicisation of the Eurozone crisis in Finland: adaptation toward the radical right?

Sanna Salo,Jens Rydgren

doi:10.1080/21699763.2018.1520141

Sanna Salo, Jens Rydgren

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1080/21699763.2018.1520141

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Abstract

AbstractThis paper analyses the politicisation of the Eurozone crisis in Finnish public debate, in May-November 2010. We emphasise how the mainstream parties responded to the radical right Finns Party's framing, in addition to two context factors: first, the constraints posed on domestic policymakers by EU and EMU-level decisions, and secondly, the sharp, economic downturn, encouraging a zero-sum interpretation of distributive claims. To trace actor positions, we analyse 1183 actor-issue statements coded from Finland's main newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat. Our findings suggest that radical right-wing parties can benefit from the high salience of socio-economic issues, if distributive conflict can plausibly be portrayed as a in- and out-group conflict, and that the mainstream parties did not only adopt nationalistic rhetoric as a response to the radical right-wing Finns Party's framing, but were responding to a constraints such as the diminished room for maneuver in the EMU, moving them towards the Finns Party's position.

Highlights

Radical right-wing parties today form an established – and substantial – part of party systems across the Euro-Atlantic area
We set out to examine the politicisation of the Eurozone crisis in the Finnish public debate
We argued that the political conflict that emerged in the crisis had the distinctly new feature of combining socio-economic questions – taxation and redistribution – with socio-cultural questions of borders and boundaries

Summary

Introduction

Radical right-wing parties today form an established – and substantial – part of party systems across the Euro-Atlantic area. Their ethnic nationalism is followed by an exclusionary attitude towards immigrants and – to varying degrees – towards other ethnic or racial minorities They tend to be populists in accusing elites of putting internationalism ahead of the nation and of putting their own narrow self-interests and various special interests ahead of the interests of the people (Rydgren, 2017, 2018). While the socio-cultural nationalis framing may originally have been the preference of the Finns Party, the frame would not have prevailed without the support of the mainstream parties These were bound by the constraints of Finland’s EMU membership, effectively forcing them to accept participation in the costly financial rescue packages for Greece, Portugal and Ireland. We present the qualitative analysis of the debates and the last section concludes

Literature review & theoretical framework

Conclusion

Findings

Notes on contributors