European Parliament election: Finland's 'missing' immigrant and minority candidates

Looking through the list of 232 candidates running in the European Parliament election, it looks fairly balanced in gender terms across the breadth of the 14 parties.

There’s also a good mix of younger and older candidates; and of course a broad representative geographic spread too.

But one thing that jumps out is how white the candidate list is, which stands in stark contrast to the multi-cultural and diverse populations that make up Finland’s biggest cities.

So are Finns with minority and immigrant backgrounds properly represented at this European Parliament election? Finland has so far never sent such an MEP to Brussels, and even the lone Sámi candidate with a decent shot of getting elected in the 2019 election, Mikkel Näkkäläjärvi, did not make it on the Social Democrats’ list.

“Finland doesn’t have a long history of having diversity in itself. People my age are the first generation of non-white people who are born here, my generation,” explains Shawn Huff, a candidate for the Greens.

Huff, a Helsinki City Councillor and former captain of the Finnish men’s basketball national team, says that minorities often get involved first in sport - on the field like him - or in the arts, but only much later in politics.

“It takes time to change attitudes, and still there are a lot of rooms in politics which are all white, and we don’t have the representation of children of immigrants who were born here. I have to remind people that those are Finns too,” he tells Finland Insider.

Huff, 40, was born in Finland to an African-American father, famous basketball player and coach Leon Huff. That makes Shawn one of the few candidates with immigrant or minority backgrounds running in the European Parliament election race.

The Greens, Left Alliance and Kokoomus are the mainstream parties with the most minority representation.

“In Finland we don’t even have the words to talk about the issue the right way, our language is clunky when it comes to talking about people with immigrant backgrounds,” says Huff.

“Growing up in Finland I didn’t really have a lot of role models in a lot of places. I didn’t see people like me talking Finnish on TV or in politics or even in sport at that time.

“I want to be part of changing this narrative,” he adds, listing the climate crisis and security policy as two of the biggest issues he would hope to tackle as an MEP.

How do political parties choose their candidates?

People in Finland with minority or immigrant backgrounds have traditionally not been among the most enthusiastic to vote, explains Theodora Helimäki, a political scientist at the University of Helsinki.

That is amplified, she says, in the European Parliament election where there has been a low turnout over the last two decades. In 2019 there was a small uptick, but still only slightly more than 42% of eligible voters cast their ballots.

“I think why we don’t see so many of them running in the European Parliament election is because now parties can nominate much fewer candidates and their research has shown a lot of ethnic minorities in Finland, even though they have the rights, they do not turn out to vote as much a Finns without a minority or immigrant background,” she tells Finland Insider.

“The parties know if their lists are too diverse, in a sense, then maybe they don’t get as many votes. So the strategy has been to put forward as many ‘known’ candidates as possible to increase the votes,” Helimäki explains.

Campaigning for this election has been noticeably less intense than for this year’s presidential election, or last year’s parliamentary elections, and Theodora Helimäki says that parties have a “low incentive”.

“It is left to the individual candidates to campaign on their own, rather than the parties campaigning on their behalf,” she says, explaining that low turnout can be partially explained by voters feeling “disenfranchised from the process.”

“Either they don’t understand how the European Parliament works and what it does, or they think they are too far removed from it.”