The biography of his Instagram profile is fiercely anti-political. Riikka Purra45, candidate for prime minister in Finland, appears very blond and smiling with the bio that reads as follows: «No politics here! But whole foods, plant-based, raw, fruit juices, moments of daily life. Mother, wife, survivor. Finnish MP and party chairman.’ She is the leader of a sovereign party, i True Finnswhich was called the Rural Party in the 1950s and which still maintains a national-conservative and Eurosceptic orientation today.
Finland builds a wall on the border with Russia: “It will be 200 km long and 3 meters high”
Riikka Purra, the anti Sanna Marin
On Sunday 2 April she will challenge the current premier, the social democrat, Atlantic and feminist Sanna Marine, who became the youngest prime minister in the world at 34. When a video of her dancing with friends, influencers and a Finnish pop star surfaced on social media, Purra asked her to publicly perform a drug test.
Now they will have to deal with elections: we vote to elect the 200 seats of the Parliament and in the polls they are tied, at 19.2%. Purra’s party has up to 30% support among first-time voters.
Purra proposes itself as an alternative to the right and the left. «The situation is the same as many other times: the left is shouting that the bad guys are cutting billions from subsidies and undermining services. On the right, on the other hand, there is a cry that the wimps don’t cut enough. Are we therefore the right alternative also for this reason, in these times of turbulence?», he writes on Twitter.
His strong points are immigration and opposition to subsidies for immigrants. She campaigns by citing direct and personal experiences: as a child she was molested by a foreigner and therefore accuses the whole model of integration.
After February 24, 2022, Finland applied to join the NATO military alliance. The country shares Europe’s longest land border with Russia, at 1,300 km. Who will bring Finland into NATO? Because the Social Democrats of Sanna Marin have only started the process of joining NATO, supported by 80% of Finns.
Finland, Ukraine and Russia: how Purra takes sides
It is on the Ukrainian question that the challenge becomes interesting, in fact. Just like Giorgia Meloni, Purra starts off to the right and follows a trajectory that lands on the Atlantic side. The True Finns party is staunchly anti-Soviet and avowedly pro-Ukrainian, such as FdI. At the cost of overturning opposite past positions. At the 2009 European elections, the True Finns party, which Purra has led since 2021, reached 9.79%, elected an MEP and joined the EFD group. In the 2012 presidential elections, then leader Timo Soini, fiercely anti-EU and to a lesser extent anti-NATO, finished fourth out of eight candidates. At the 2014 European elections they obtained two seats and joined the Group of European Conservatives and Reformists which refers to the ECR, the European political party chaired by Giorgia Meloni. The True Finns party also went into government in 2015 and had to tone down its anti-European tone a lot.
Real Finns, despite being Eurosceptics, do not join the Fixit campaign (exit from the European Union). They supported Finland’s accession to NATO. Russia’s brutal aggression in Ukraine highlights the themes of national pride and sovereignty of the far right, which translate into anti-migration policies but at the same time protection against neighboring Russian imperialism.
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