Greens draw battlelines against True Finns

[The Ripper]

The Green League held a defiant party council meeting over the weekend with Anni Sinnemäki, party leader and labour minister, departing from her prepared speech by saying that the fight against the True Finns was an important feature of the Greens' general election campaign.

Sinnemäki said voters would choose between an open Finland and a closed Finland.

The True Finns, a party that rides on an immigration-critical platform, has overtaken the Greens to become the country's fourth-largest party in terms of poll ratings.

Sinnemäki accused the True Finns of playing to the public's fears.

Ville Niinistö, the chairman of the Greens' parliamentary group, said some of the True Finns resorted to rhetoric that was exactly the same as that deployed by the Sweden Democrats.

"Many True Finns hanker after a monolithic Finland where everybody must be the same."

Oras Tynkkynen, a Green MP and climate aide at the prime minister's office, spent his entire speech blasting the True Finns, pointing to a contradiction in the party's proposal to cut foreign aid and its goal to reduce immigration.

Among motions approved by the party council was a proposal to lift mandatory Swedish-language tuition in eastern Finland.

In another controversial proposal, the party council proposed doing away with Swedish language exams for civil servants.

Sinnemäki and Tuija Brax, the justice minister, distanced themselves from the two proposals Timo Soini, the True Finns leader, said the "Green elite" was nervous about changes they would likely face at the general election.

"By mounting the attack the Greens are trying to mask their own failure in the nuclear power decision," Soini said in a statement Sunday.

"The Greens have managed to dupe the old parties into backing their cost-raising energy policy."


http://www.helsinkitimes.fi/htimes/domestic-news/politics/12713-greens-draw-battlelines-against-true-finns-.html

The Greens are of course trying to emphasize the kulturkampf-theme instead of their "real" ecological agenda to get more support, but I think it might end up benefiting the True Finns more. ;)

[Groenewolf]

It might win them some votes, in the same D66 got some more votes thanks to Pechthold's anti-Wilders campaign. But in the end the True Finns will gain more votes because they takes the Finnish population and their 'fears' more serious. But that is not something those pseudo-greens will ever consider.

[The Lawspeaker]

They call themselves Green because they are too yellow to admit they're actually Reds. ----Lord Christopher Monckton

[Eldritch]

"Watermelons" is what we call them in this country: green on the outside, red on the inside.

[Debaser11]

Civis beat me to it! One should always be hesitant about embracing environmental platforms. They strike me as more of a form of social control than anything. Good luck to the True Finns.

[Motörhead Remember Me]

Civis beat me to it! One should always be hesitant about embracing environmental platforms. They strike me as more of a form of social control than anything. Good luck to the True Finns.

Nothing wrong with environmental plattforms. The environment is the most important thing we have. Unfortunately these parties are plagued by an overly naive thinking. True Finns politicians come from a politically rural background so the environmental thinking is somewhere there also...

[Groenewolf]

Nothing wrong with environmental plattforms. The environment is the most important thing we have. Unfortunately these parties are plagued by an overly naive thinking.

I presume you are talking about Green parties. The problem is something different. These platforms have since long been overtaken by Marxists and other people of the far-left who are not so concerned about the environment but as using at as an other platform for pushing their own overall agenda that have very little to do with nature.

[The Lawspeaker]

I think that the real Greens left the Green movement a long time ago when it was taken over by the Reds as the early Green movement was a strictly a-political movement of concerned citizens (I only need to think about the Vereniging Natuurmonumenten which was created by people with money and a deep concern for their local environment as far back as 1905 !) and only concerned themselves with the protection of the environment in one way or the other.