Jussi Halla-aho, the chairperson of the Finns Party, viewed that the debate surrounding the somewhat controversial term has been an attempt to prompt the populist right-wing party to attempt to define the population that is being replaced and, thereby, to define Finnishness.

KEY MEMBERS of the Finns Party attempted to make sense of the term “replacement of population” at SuomiAreena in Pori, Western Finland, on Tuesday.

“I can’t give you an all-encompassing definition of who is and who isn’t a Finn. It’s a case-by-case thing,” he said at the annually held debate forum.

“I think we all have a relatively cohesive, intuitive understanding of whether or not someone walking towards us is a Finn. And this question is much more complicated than what’s that someone’s skin colour or family background. We can’t even start by saying that everyone who was born in Finland is part of this group.”

Also Riikka Purra, the first deputy chairperson of the Finns Party, referred to intuition in explaining the concept.

“If you look in front of you here, you could think that the talk about replacement of population is hooey: Wherever you look, you see a Finn. But walking in Uusimaa, Helsinki and Espoo, I can intuitively think based on people’s external characteristics that our population is constantly changing. The same argument is supported by statistics,” she said.

The debate surrounding the term has be linked partly to the ethno-nationalist statements made by the Finns Party Youth.

Aleksi Teivainen – HT

Source: Uusi Suomi