Finland has long been seen as a haven of progressive values — a perception earned through its strong welfare and education offers since the postwar decades. However, its right-wing coalition government, headed by Prime Minister Petteri Orpo of the center-right National Coalition Party and his deputy premier, Riikka Purra of the right-populist Finns Party, has set about imposing austerity. The plans mean harsh cuts across the country’s public services.
Next in line are cuts to culture, with €18 million to be slashed from arts funding next year, and more to follow in 2026. This is a drop in the ocean in terms of overall spending — but will heavily impact cultural provision, making the proposed cuts appear ideologically targeted. In the short term, the plans threaten theater and music production, although with Purra stating during a leaders’ debate in 2023 that she sees the arts as a “luxury,” it would appear that the government views culture in the widest sense as a target.
This is not an unusually Finnish affair. Cultural practitioners lean left, so they tend to often be an early casualty of right-wing austerity measures. Indeed, we saw this already in the United Kingdom under the Tory/Liberal Democrat coalition in the 2010s and in the United States during Donald Trump’s first term.
A campaign has been started to oppose what is being portrayed as a dangerous threat to Finland’s cultural independence. The Sakset seis (in English “Cut the Cuts”) campaign is centered upon a Great Culture Petition, which its organizers hope will force a change in the government’s cultural policy. The petition’s name draws upon the Great Petition of 1899, signed by more than half a million people opposed to the tsarist rule of Emperor Nicholas II and the limits he imposed on Finnish autonomy.
That petition entered the Finnish historical consciousness as instrumental in the independence movement, even though the tsar refused to meet the…
Auteur: Mike Watson
