Finnish MP’s Tweet Sparks Heated Debate

Far-right Finns Party MP Laura Huhtasaari tweeted an angry rant against a group of teenagers and their school on September 30, inciting a wave of xenophobia.

Huhtassari tweeted to her nearly 12,000 followers a photograph of a school poster made by three 15-year-old students. The refugee-sympathetic poster features immigrants seeking asylum from a crowded boat with a choice at either side.

To the left of the boat, under the heading Suomeen, meaning their first choice is to go to Finland, the students glued two pictures: one of Finland’s President Sauli Niinisto from the National Coalition Party and one of MP Pekka Haavisto from the Green League.

To the right of the boat, under the heading Kuoleen, meaning their other choice is to go to death, the students glued another two pictures. On top is a picture of Jussi Halla-aho, the leader of the Finns Party, and on the bottom is a picture of Huhtassari.

“Several students have contacted me and said that teachers at the school engage in hate speech and incite and encourage hatred towards democratically-elected politicians. This is happening at primary and upper secondary schools,” Huhtasaari tweeted with the poster’s picture.

The mayor of Tampere, Johanna Loukaskorpi, said that politicians should not meddle with schools’ curricula to serve their own purposes.

“I think it’s most unfortunate that an MP would highlight an individual school and students in a tweet to promote her political ideology. A lawmaker should encourage young people to influence society – not try to forbid it or question [their] methods when they don’t happen to conform to her own views,” Loukaskorpi stated.

Further complicating the situation, Huhtassari’s tweet included the names of the students who created the poster in the lower right hand corner. While Huhtassari condemned the school for allowing its students to take a partisan approach to the topic of immigration, she also exposed the three teenaged creators of the poster to online threats and attacks.

The school, located in Tampere in Southern Finland, told the Finnish Broadcasting Company that the photo has been misrepresented and that the administration has received calls accusing the school of brainwashing children with Jihadism and Marxism.

“I must admit it was an unpleasant surprise. Students’ names should not be published without permission,” the school’s principal added.

Huhtassari and her supporters have addressed public criticism of the divulgation of the students’ names by claiming that the poster was made public by the school itself.

”We are talking about work that was publicly displayed in the school lobby. The first names are there, all of the names should have been cropped. Naturally the teacher and principal are responsible for what kind of work ends up on the school walls. The responsibility lies with the teacher and the principal, not the students,” argued Huhtassari.

Huhtassari profiled herself as a euroskeptic, evolution skeptic, anti-immigration candidate when she ran in Finland’s 2018 presidential election. She obtained only 6.8 percent of the vote. Prior to the controversy created by the school poster, Huhtassari was involved in a scandal over claims that she plagiarized her master’s thesis.