A taxpayer revolt in Europe, which most recently struck in Iceland, has now swept into Finland as well. There, the True Finn party has come out of nowhere to take control of 39 seats in that nation’s parliament in the April 2011 election.
The party won on an anti-bailout message. This makes them the third largest party in the country, just slightly less than the National Coalition, with 44 seats, and the Social Democrats, with 42.
In the prior election, the True Finns had only polled with 4.1 percent of the vote, but now have risen to 19 percent of the vote. Their dramatic rise can solely be attributed to their message. True Finn leader Timo Soini believes that bankrupt sovereigns like Greece, Portugal, and Ireland should be allowed to go into default instead of being bailed out by other European Union (EU) members.
“[A] symbiosis has developed between politicians and banks: Our political leaders borrow ever more money to pay off the banks, which return the favor by lending ever more money back to our governments,” Soini writes in the Wall Street Journal. He says regular citizens are not the ones who have benefited from the bailouts, but faceless bankers.
“The money did not go to help indebted economies. It flowed through the European Central Bank and recipient states to the coffers of big banks and investment funds,” Soini noted.
Soini’s solution? Let them fail. “Insolvent banks and financial institutions must be shut down, purging insolvency from the system. We must restore the market principle of freedom to fail,” he boldly suggests.
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