Sebastian Tynkkynen has been a member of the European Parliament for the Finns Party since July 2024. He was previously a member of the Finnish Parliament from April 2019 until his election to the European Parliament. He is the third vice-president of his party and was its youth leader until November 2016.
Finland is going to end economic aid to Somalia because Somalia refuses to take back its illegal immigrants, whom Finland wants to expel. If I am not mistaken, this was one of the Finnish measures against illegal immigration.
Yes; basically, this is happening because the Finns Party is in government, but it is something that has been on our political agenda for a long time and white could not be implemented from the opposition, because all of the other parties were against taking these measures. When we negotiated our way into government, we pushed for the acceptance of this policy. Now it is time to activate it, because Somalia did not want to accept its citizens who were living illegally in Finland. That is why we have cut off our development aid to them; we hope that this will help them to reconsider their position. The idea is that we have to treat these countries—whether they are from the ‘Global South’ or developing countries—as adults. We can’t give them money no matter what they do—they have to be treated as equals and made to understand that there are consequences if they don’t behave properly.
What are Somalia’s reasons for not taking back its citizens?
The problem in this case is that the Somali government does not want to take back migrants who do not want to leave Finland, and Somalia is not concerned that its citizens have entered Finland illegally. For our part, we are willing to bear the costs of these repatriations and we have the police resources to do so. We have even offered money in exchange for voluntary repatriation, but the Somali government does not want to cooperate.
Has Finnish society’s attitude to illegal migration changed?
Yes, and it has changed very quickly. Now the question is clearly being asked about what kind of migration we want and need. And we are not only talking about refugees or those who have applied for asylum, but also about those whose applications have been rejected and who are therefore no longer in the country legally. Of course, the Left has always been against tightening migration policy, but now even social democrats and centrists understand that illegal migrants cannot stay in Finland and must be sent back to their countries of origin. But they are reluctant to take concrete action and are complaining and accusing us of being bad people for cutting development aid—i.e., they don’t want them in our country, but they are not willing to make repatriation possible.
Some left-wing MPs voted in favour of the border law passed by the Finnish parliament in July.
First, the law needed a five-sixths majority in parliament first to be declared as urgent; then it needed a two-thirds majority to pass, because it was an exceptional law that went beyond the constitution. The Left and the Greens opposed the law outright, and six Social Democrat MPs joined them; but all the others voted in favour. It is the toughest border law in the whole of Europe, and I hope it will be a model for other European countries that need to take similar measures. In Poland, it has already been said publicly that they are considering adopting the Finnish model.
Has Russia’s use of migration as part of a hybrid war been a determining factor in the rapid change in attitudes in Finnish society?
It is one of the reasons for the change, but it is not the only reason, nor is it the main reason. The migration crisis in 2015 opened the eyes of many Finns, and two years later, in 2017, we suffered the first terrorist attack in Finland, when an Islamist went out hunting for women and killed two of them. In 2018, there were dozens of cases of rape of very young girls by migrants in the city of Oulu. The next big step was when Russia started to use migrants as a weapon against Finland. Then, many people asked whether the asylum seekers who were in the ‘grey zone’ were really asylum seekers. This opened the eyes of many Finns, but the process had already started.
In Finland, you know what it is like to be Russia’s neighbour. What do you think of the Kremlin’s new nuclear threats?
I understand that people in Spain and other Western countries may be afraid of Putin’s threats, because they are not used to living with such a dangerous neighbour. Russia has been threatening us in so many ways for decades that we understand that Putin is bluffing and trying to get something for nothing. We have seen the same story many times during the war in Ukraine: you cannot cross this red line. What he is trying to do with these threats is to stop support for Ukraine and to stop anyone from interfering with his project of turning Russia into an imperialist power. The last time Russia threatened us was when we joined NATO and the Kremlin warned us that there would be “harsh consequences” for us. We did it and nothing happened; Putin was bluffing again and we saw it very clearly. Nuclear war is a long way off because Russia knows it has much more to lose in such a war. There are many countries in the world, in the West, that would attack Russia, and that is why they are not interested in doing so. They just use threats to create fear.
The EU has a new Commission in which ECR has a vice-president. What will be different from von der Leyen’s previous mandate?
I know that this Commission will be better than the previous one because it has to be realistic in the face of the geopolitical situation and new agendas have been prepared because of Russia’s war in Ukraine. These new policies will be much more realistic. Of course, I am not happy with the new Commission because there is still a lot of naivety and there are not enough members from conservative parties. But the EPP members are under a lot of political pressure from the conservative parties in their countries and that forces them to be realistic. The time for saying something tough, but then acting like the Left, is over. I am sure that European Commissioners like Teresa Ribera will be a disaster, but they will face a lot of resistance over the next five years.
What do you expect from Trump’s new term?
I think that, in Donald Trump’s first term, there was a change in Europe—not a big change, but a tendency to understand the new reality. The United States had been the security provider for our continent, and from Europe you could say that the king was naked. We thought we were very strong, but we had not prepared ourselves and our defence budgets were not sufficient. With his second term in office, Europe knows that it can no longer make mistakes about its security and that it has to do things on its own. This is the biggest impact that Trump’s election will have on Europe. Now is the time to increase our military budgets and to bring back the manufacturing industry, in order to be able to build our own capabilities and not be dependent on the outside.
