New policy aims to clear Finland's reputation following racist scandals

Following a long string of controversial incidents carrying a racist undertone, Finland’s new coalition government has agreed on a policy to fight racism after months of accusations against it.

As reported by Al Jazeera, Prime Minister Petteri Orpo, whose conservative National Coalition Party (NCP) narrowly won the April election, disclosed that his government has agreed to tackle racism and discrimination.

“Every minister in the government will renounce racism and commit to active work against racism in Finland and internationally”, he said during a joint news conference in the presence of the three other party leaders that make up the coalition government.

This includes the right-wing populist "The Finns" party, which has been involved in several scandals since entering the coalition in June, deemed to be racist and bigoted.

Its member Vilhem Junnila, then-Minister for Economy, was forced to resign over repeated references to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis on his social media, as well as in campaign adverts, which he referred to as being "a joke".

The Finns' party leader, Riikka Purra, who was appointed Finance Minister in the new government, had to apologize in July for violent comments she had posted anonymously online about 15 years ago, involving the shooting of migrants.

Her old blog post read "If I was given a gun, there’d be corpses", referring to an incident involving a migrant minor.

This move comes only a few days after the Danish government's proposal to introduce a law prohibiting the desecration of religious books, following a long history of Quran burnings which repeatedly leads to uproar in Muslim countries and has earned Denmark a reputation of intolerance.