Helsinki—Racism doesn’t come readily to mind when you think of Finland. The country has been lauded—justifiably so—as the plucky nation that joined NATO last spring, defying neighboring Russia; it is considered a model social democracy. For six straight years, it came out on top of the World Happiness Report issued by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network. But racism, though rarely discussed, has long been a fact of life here. A 2018 EU survey of minority views in 12 EU nations found that Finland ranked first for racial discrimination, racist threats, and violent attacks.

But racism was never on Finland’s political agenda until the far-right Finns Party—think Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France or Alternative for Germany—finished second in last April’s election. It’s now a powerhouse in the most right-wing government in recent history.

Like their right-wing counterparts across Western Europe, the Finns’ calling card is opposition to immigration—more precisely, non-white immigration. While the party has greeted Ukrainian refugees with open arms, it has posted a “not welcome” sign for Middle Eastern and African asylum-seekers. That posture violates basic human rights. It also spells disaster for a country that badly needs immigrants to bolster a sagging economy.

In no other EU nation except Italy does such an openly racist party hold the reins of power. “People who have consistently made racist statements are now running government departments. This could lead to normalizing racist views,” Aleksi Neuvonen, cofounder of Demos Helsinki, a nonpartisan social policy think tank, explained.

Finnish politics is usually a dozy affair, but this has been the summer of bombshells. In June, just days after the new cabinet had been announced, the government was engulfed in a series of crises, triggered by racist and neo-Nazi slurs from newly minted Finns Party cabinet members.

The economics minister, Vilhelm Junnila, was immediately in trouble because of his neo-Nazi ties. He spoke at a 2019 gathering of the who’s who of neo-Nazis in Finland, organized by the Nordic Resistance Movement, a terrorist organization bent on establishing a totalitarian neo-Nazi Nordic state. And while campaigning this spring, he joked about the number 88, code for the greeting “Heil Hitler.”

When the story broke, Junnila barely survived a no-confidence vote in Parliament. But after the Helsinki Sanomat, the New York Times of Finland, unearthed a speech he had delivered in Parliament that exhorted African women to have abortions as a solution to the climate crisis—“climate abortion,” he called it—he resigned. He had been on the job for just 10 days.

Junnila’s successor, Wille Rydman, has a similarly scurrilous track record. In messages to a former girlfriend that were published in the Sanomat, Rydman described Somalis as “spreading like weeds” and derided people from the Middle East as “apes” and “desert monkeys.” When his girlfriend said that if she had a child she’d like to give it a biblical Hebrew name like Emmanuel, he responded that “we Nazis do not really like that kind of Jew stuff.” Far from resigning, Rydman took the offensive—taking a leaf from Donald Trump’s playbook, he threatened to sue the newspaper for invading his privacy.

Deputy prime minister and Finns Party leader Riikka Purra wrist-slapped Rydman, calling his messages “inappropriate.” But Purra is hardly one to talk. In text messages posted 15 years ago on a far-right forum, she fantasized about like-minded Finns “in the stadium spitting on beggars and beating black children.” After a slanging match with immigrant teenagers, she wrote that “if they gave me a gun, there would be bodies on a commuter train.”