THE AGEING Elvis impersonator ladles out pea soup in the chilly car park, urging each grateful recipient to vote for the True Finns.
As locals squeeze mustard into their bowls of green slop, True Finn candidate Seppo Kanerva talks about his party to the small crowd in Helsinki’s working class suburb of Jakomaki.
Support for Europe’s latest right-wing populist party has doubled in just a year to nearly 20 per cent. Normally sedate Finnish voters are set to back the True Finns in record numbers in Sunday’s general election to vent their frustrations with the established political parties. The True Finns are the vent, with a populist, law and order manifesto that is anti-immigrant, EU critical and vigorously opposed to euro zone bailouts.
“Finland is a small place and these other countries are not our concern,” says Seppo Kanerva, a 70-year-old former commodore of the Finnish naval police, as he hands out pamphlets promising to “stop social welfare layabouts and EU bailouts”.
It is no coincidence that support for the True Finns, until last year languishing in single digits, took off just as the Greek bailout was agreed last May. Assistance for Ireland pushed it up further, as have the latest loans to Lisbon. This opposition is interesting in light of Finland’s own recent past.
“We had our own crisis 20 years ago and we had to come through it on our own,” says Mr Kanerva, whose story is familiar to Irish ears.
Two decades ago, the Lapland native built up a small empire of rental properties for himself in a prosperous era of easy money.
“The banks just said, ‘take the money, all’s well,’” he says. But it wasn’t: Finland’s decade-long boom was a foreign currency-fuelled debt binge that had seen deregulated financial markets transformed into a kasinotalous or “casino economy”.
Banks lost the run of themselves and encouraged customers to do the same. Then the collapse of the Soviet Union, a major trading partner, triggered an economic shock that ended in disaster: the banks were nationalised, house prices halved and the economy shrunk by 14 per cent. “I came within a hair’s breadth of bankruptcy and was very lucky not to lose my home,” says Mr Kanerva.
But few here appear to make a connection between the Finnish and Irish crises. “The comparison is accurate but there is little empathy here because the electorate doesn’t have a very clear picture of what has happened in Ireland,” says Roger Wessman, research director at Nordea Markets in Helsinki.
“If they knew it wasn’t just about irresponsible lending the sympathy would be higher – but their lack of knowledge is what’s boosting the True Finns.”
That’s not to say that Ireland’s reputation in Finland is ruined: we are not viewed with the same odium as the Greeks and Portuguese. And Finns who have made the connection say they are happy if Finland can help a European neighbour avoid a similar trauma.
Entrepreneur Markku Wuoti recalls the bad days of the 1990s when, with his engineering works facing ruin, he spent days hiding from his family. With help he managed to turn things around and, in thanks, he set up a crisis hotline for entrepreneurs facing ruin.
“There was a high suicide rate, with thousands and thousands of companies going under,” he remembers. The final blow for many companies were loans that doubled in value overnight following the Finnish government’s last, desperate attempt to stop the crisis: the devaluation of the markka.
Finns listen with interest to the argument, made by a thousand pub economists in Ireland, that not being able to devalue in the euro zone has harmed Ireland more than helped it. Many here shake their head at that argument.
“The big difference then to now was the currency: people had lost confidence in the markka. At least the same hasn’t happened to the Irish with the euro,” says Timo Lindholm of the Association of Finnish Entrepreneurs.
Many economists see Irish devaluation talk as an understandable if somewhat academic argument.
“Ireland’s approach is the only alternative to complete collapse,” says Roger Wessman of Nordea. “The only advantage of devaluation is you can do it quickly. But in the end, I think Finland’s and Ireland’s solutions will have the same effect.”
Back in the Jakomaki shopping centre car park, the True Finn supporters are wavering in their opposition to bailouts. “It’s unfair if it hits pensions,” says Raile, an elderly woman in a wool beret. “But if you have to help I guess you have to do it, even if no one likes it.”