On the 19th of April Finland will hold their National Elections. To help the Finnish population make up their mind the nationalTV station ‘Yle’ created an election compass and made an interview with every candidate in the election. They interviewed 1,826 candidates where each candidate was given four minutes to explain their politics and ideas. The video clips from all candidates can be watched in their video-gallery.

In earlier elections the Organization for Security and Co-operation (OSCE) gave several warnings to Finland for not being democratically fair towards smaller parties. Finnish media usually boycotts small political parties, preventing them from entering parliament. Receiving pressure from OSCE was one of the reasons Yle decided to do these four minute interviews with every candidate for this election.

Hansi Harjunharja from Piraattipuolue (PPFI) used his four minutes to make a joke about the stereotypes of small party candidates. He talks about being hungry when asked about the largest problems in Finland, calls himself an artist and stages a mock cremation of his pet gerbil ‘Tero’. His interview had the intended effect and went viral. After about a week the original clip from Yle currently has 229.000 views and another copy of the clip that was uploaded to Youtube  has 157,000 views [update: it’s been removed]. Another clip, that was subtitled into English, got 20,000 views (below)

Using his four minutes to pull a joke, such as this, gave PPFI a lot of extra media attention, despite not having any well known candidates on their list. After his performance Hansi has made good and proper interviews to make clear it was all a performance act and not someone crazy. From his video going viral a lot of people had to view other videos, to see if rest of PPFI were as crazy, resulting in  four of the six top videos in the Yle gallery are from PPFI candidates.

The Pirate Party Finland (PPFI) has 123 candidates registered for the election (max possible is 200). Since the last elections four years ago they have managed to increase their election budget slightly and their reputation has been on a steady increase. PPFI aims to triple their support in the upcoming elections. If they reach that goal they would get one representative in three different main regions elected.

Featured image: Screenshot from interview with Hansi

About Josef Ohlsson Collentine

I’m a dual citizen (American/Swede) and try to integrate my reflections from a more global perspective if possible. I’m the organizational leader for Pirate Times and work actively to strengthen the pirate movement through this work as well as being the international contact for Piratpartiet (PPSE). Elected board member of PPSE for 2015-2018.
If you would like to ask me something I speak English, Swedish and Spanish. Find me on the links below

 

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On the 19th of April Finland will hold their National Elections. To help the Finnish population make up their mind the nationalTV station ‘Yle’ created an election compass and made…