by OTTO KYYRONEN
In Finland, a coalition of conservative and far-right parties is slashing social spending and squashing unions. It’s an authoritarian brand of neoliberalism that is undoing welfare while giving tax cuts to high earners.
In Finland, the liberal-conservative National Coalition Party and the far-right Finns Party, whose members together add up to nearly 90 percent of the current government, have united around a shared political project: authoritarian neoliberalism. The right-wing government is taking from the poor to give to the rich while dismantling Finland’s rule-of-law state and civil society.
Prime Minister Petteri Orpo’s coalition government took office on June 20, 2023. That same day, it unveiled its plan to slash public spending — primarily on health care and social security — by €4 billion by 2027, while granting a tax cut to individuals earning over €85,800 a year in wages and salary. The plan also included undermining the power of trade unions.
Less than a year later, this April 16, Orpo’s government announced an additional €1.6 billion in spending cuts and a 1.5 percentage point increase in the value-added tax rate, signaling its rejection of progressive tax-reform proposals. The situation worsened in July when President Alexander Stubb, a member of the National Coalition Party, signed a controversial bill granting the government the power to block asylum seekers from entering Finland through Russia. The bill violated constitutional and international laws, as well as migrants’ human rights, and marked the partial fulfillment of the Finns Party’s long-standing goal of closing the country’s borders to migrants.
On August 8, Finance Minister Riikka Purra revealed that the 2025 budget would include an additional €100 million in cuts to public spending. A month later, reports emerged that Orpo’s government, along with the Ministry of Finance, had urged the European Commission to alter the criteria for assessing Finland’s public indebtedness. This move will make it significantly harder for Finland to comply with the European Union’s new fiscal rules without imposing further spending cuts.
These and other reforms highlight how neoliberalism is turning increasingly authoritarian in Finland. While the world often views Finland as a model of well-functioning social democracy, Orpo’s government has launched a relentless attack on the Finnish welfare state, eroding the pillars of the Nordic welfare model that made it so famous in the first place.
The Great Moving Right Show, Finnish Style
In his 1979 essay, “The Great Moving Right Show,” cultural theorist Stuart Hall reflected on Britain’s political shift to the Right during the 1970s. Hall sought to explain “how a capitalist economic recession is . . . ‘lived,’ for increasing numbers of people, through the themes and representations (ideologically) of a virulent, emergent ‘petty-bourgeois’ ideology.”
Hall’s inquiry centered on Thatcherism, the British variant of neoliberalism. It championed, he said, “the restoration of competition and personal responsibility for effort and reward, the image of the over-taxed individual, enervated by welfare coddling, his initiative sapped by handouts by the state.” Since then, neoliberalism has spread across the globe, including to Finland, where the early 1990s depression threw open the Overton window and paved the way for Finland’s transition from Fordism to neoliberalism.
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