Jussi Halla-aho

Jussi Kristian Halla-aho (born 27 April 1971) is a Finnish politician, currently serving as the Speaker of the Parliament of Finland since 2023. Halla-aho has served as a member of the Parliament of Finland from 2011 to 2014 and again since 2019, and as the leader of the Finns Party from 10 June 2017 to 14 August 2021. Previously, between 2014 and 2019, he was a member of the European Parliament, where he was part of the Identity and Democracy group.

Halla-aho has a PhD in Slavic Studies. Before entering national politics, he was best known for criticising multiculturalism and Finland's immigration policies in his online blog, Scripta. He was first elected to the Helsinki City Council in 2008 and to the Finnish parliament in 2011. In 2014 he was elected to the European Parliament. He was elected leader of the Finns Party in the summer of 2017, defeating Sampo Terho, and Halla-aho won the largest share of personal votes in the country. During the 1980s he travelled to the Soviet Union with his father, who was a bus driver. The trip was the spark for his anti-leftist convictions.

Education

After high school, Halla-aho enrolled in Pirkanmaa Hotel and Restaurant Institute, where he obtained a vocational diploma to become a restaurant waiter. From 1995 to 2000, he was enrolled in the University of Helsinki, studying Russian, Croatian, Polish and Ukrainian, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Old Persian, Old Irish and Old English. Awarded a MA in 2000, in 2006 he obtained his Ph.D, with a dissertation on historical nominal morphology of Old Church Slavonic. He has published one article in an academic journal. although he was not a member of the party until 2010. In the 2008 elections, he was the 18th most popular candidate in the entire country and the second most popular candidate of the Finns Party after the party leader Timo Soini. Halla-aho won the largest number of personal votes for the party in Helsinki.

Halla-aho was elected to parliament in 2011. His vote share was the sixth highest in the country and the second highest within his party. In the parliament he was made chairman of the Administration Committee, which deals with immigration affairs among other matters. However, in the summer of 2012 Halla-aho resigned from the position of committee chairman, while staying as a member of the committee. Halla-aho was re-elected to the Helsinki City Council in 2012, being the third most popular candidate nationwide.

Halla-aho was elected to the European Parliament in 2014. He was the second most popular candidate in the election with 80,772 votes. He sits in the European Conservatives and Reformists Group (ECR). He is a member of the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs, and a substitute member of the Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection.

In 2017, Halla-aho announced he would run for the party chair in the Finns Party leadership election, as the long-time leader of the party Timo Soini decided not to seek another term. During the campaign, Halla-aho and Sampo Terho emerged as the leading candidates, according to opinion polls. Halla-aho emerged victorious in the party conference in Jyväskylä on 10 June, winning a majority of delegates in the first round, and was officially nominated as the Leader of the Finns Party. His selection resulted in a political crisis in Finland, as the leaders of the two other governing coalition parties, Prime Minister Juha Sipilä of Centre and Finance Minister Petteri Orpo of the NCP, stated they would not co-operate with the Finns Party led by Halla-aho. The two leaders argued that their decision was based on value differences between them and Halla-aho's policies, and that the Sipilä Cabinet would duly be dissolved. On 13 June, however, twenty Finns MPs, including former leader Soini, broke away from the parliamentary group and founded New Alternative. Sipilä announced that his cabinet would continue working with New Alternative (later called Blue Reform), thus securing a parliamentary majority, and leaving the remaining Finns MPs in opposition.

Halla-aho led the remainder of the party into the 2019 parliamentary election, gaining one new seat in comparison to the 2015 elections, while none of the Blue Reform candidates got elected. Halla-aho did personally gain the most votes in the whole country and broke the record for most personal votes in Helsinki constituency.

In June 2021, Halla-aho informed that he is not running for re-election as chairman of party, but will continue in parliament and municipality.

Speaker of the Parliament In the 2023 parliamentary election, Halla-aho was re-elected with 22,081 votes. In June 2023, he was elected as the Speaker of the Parliament.

In July 2023, Halla-aho announced his candidacy for the 2024 Finnish presidential election. In the election, he placed third with 18.99% of the total vote count and failed to advance to the second round of voting.

On 25 November 2023 Halla-aho addressed the Verkhovna Rada in Ukrainian on the 90th anniversary of the Holodomor.

On 3 April 2024, he accompanied President of Finland, Alexander Stubb, on a visit to Ukraine, meeting President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv.

Parliamentary elections

Year Constituency Votes Percentage Result 2007 Helsinki 2,215 0.70% Not elected 2011 Helsinki 15,074 4.33% Elected 2019 Helsinki 30,596 7.87% Elected 2023 Helsinki 22,081 5.78% Elected

Municipal elections

Year Municipality Votes Percentage Result 2008 Helsinki 2,977 1.07% Elected 2012 Helsinki 6,034 2.11% Elected 2017 Helsinki 5,668 1.74% Elected 2021 Helsinki 18,978 5.67% Elected

European Parliament elections

Year Constituency Votes Percentage Result 2014 Finland 80,772 4.67% Elected

Political interests Halla-aho has stated that he became politically active because he finds the Finnish immigration policy a problem and believes that Europe is heading towards a catastrophe because of massive immigration. Halla-aho voices support for the welfare state, and places himself on the left side of the political spectrum, in matters of economic policy.

Halla-aho maintains a blog titled Scripta which states that it treats issues such as "immigration, multiculturalism, tolerance, racism, freedom of speech and political correctness". His blog had between 3,000 and 6,000 readers a day in 2008, which made him the best known political blogger in Finland according to the newspaper Aamulehti.

In a 2007 interview with Helsingin Sanomat Halla-aho explained his opposition to multiculturalism in the following way:

In Finland the starting point [of the conversation] is that multiculturalism is a richness in itself. This is an untenable claim. When rival value systems and codes of conduct are accepted in a society, it leads automatically to conflicts. Finland is no exception. It is mainly the attributes of the Muslim cultures, that make the integration of these groups into Finland impossible, as long as they hold on to their special characteristics and as long as the society encourages them to wrap themselves in this otherness. It creates a spiral of social exclusion and ethnic ghettoisation.

Halla-aho has demanded that positive discrimination and what he calls privileges due to culture or nationality should not be allowed. Referring to his own works, he has affirmed that criticising "totalitarian fascist ideologies like political Islam" should not be considered racism and that facts cannot be criminalised. According to Halla-aho, immigration is a taboo in Finland. He has disclosed that he has received death threats because of his web columns. having previously been a contributor to the blog Gates of Vienna. He denies xenophobia allegations against him and maintains that he is simply “critical of immigration”, (Ich finde es unmöglich zu verstehen, wie eine nazionalistische Partei Imperialismus unterstützen oder rechtfertigen kann.)

Criminal charges and conviction In December 2008, Halla-aho was put under investigation for incitement to ethnic or racial hatred (under Finnish law referred to as "ethnic agitation") for remarks published on his blog.

On 27 March 2009, the Helsinki District Court ordered Halla-aho to stand for trial on charges of ethnic agitation and breach of the sanctity of religion. The charges were raised on the basis of remarks related to the sentencing of Seppo Lehto on Halla-aho's blog in 2008. Here, he wrote that Muhammad was a pedophile, making reference to Muhammad's marriage with Aisha, who Muhammad married when Aisha was 6 or 7 and claimed that Islam is a religion that sanctifies pedophilia. The text discussed the limits of free speech and intentionally made some controversial claims in order to test the response of judiciary. In another text, he asked if it could be stated that robbing passersby and living on taxpayers' expense are cultural and possibly genetic characteristics of Somalis. The text was originally a response to a Finnish columnist of the newspaper Kaleva, who had written that drinking excessively and killing when drunk were cultural and possibly genetic characteristics of Finns and was intended to underline the hypocrisy of it being possible to be prosecuted for one of those essentially similar statements but not for the other.

On 8 September 2009, the District Court convicted Halla-aho of disturbing religious worship, and ordered him to pay a fine of 330 euros. Both the prosecutor and Halla-aho appealed the case to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court granted a leave to appeal in May 2011. In a sentence given on the 8 of June 2012, the Supreme Court found Halla-aho guilty of both disturbing religious worship and of ethnic agitation and increased his fines accordingly to 400 euros.

In 2019 Halla-aho said he still stands by his past writings.

Other controversies In December 2006 Halla-aho wrote in his blog Scripta on immigration that, “Since rapes will increase in any case, the appropriate people should be raped: in other words, green-leftist do-gooders and their supporters", naming some of the politicians which led to a police investigation.

In September 2011 Halla-aho wrote in Facebook that Greece's debt problems cannot be resolved without a military junta. He soon retracted the comment, clarifying that his intention was merely to point out that making necessary but unpopular decisions is not easy in a democracy. Timo Soini, the leader of the party, demanded a temporary suspension of Halla-aho from the parliamentary group. In the end the parliamentary group unanimously (Halla-aho himself included) suspended Halla-aho for two weeks, although Soini had initially called for a month-long suspension.

Personal life Halla-aho lives in Eira in Helsinki with his wife Hilla Halla-aho and their four children. He used to be a member of Suomen Sisu, an association that seeks to promote Finnish ethnic nationalism. He quit the association in June 2019, but did not specify why, though stating that he sees Finnish people as an ethnic folk. He is not a member in any church and considers himself a moderate agnostic atheist.

Halla-aho is occasionally referred as Mestari (Master) as a nickname among his supporters.

Publications

Academic works Halla-aho, Jussi: Problems of Proto-Slavic historical nominal morphology: On the basis of Old Church Slavic. Slavica Helsingiensia 26, Helsinki, University of Helsinki, Department of Slavonic Languages, 2006. Halla-aho, Jussi: Two borrowings in Proto-Slavic; and a minor Balto-Slavic sound change, Journal of Indo-European Studies 33, p. 233-245, 2005. Halla-aho, Jussi: “The collapse of an early Proto-Indo-European ablaut pattern.” Indogermanische Forschungen 110, p. 97-118, 2005. Nuorluoto, Juhani & Leiwo, Martti & Halla-aho, Jussi (editors): Papers in Slavic, Baltic and Balkan studies, Slavica Helsingiensia 21, Helsinki, University of Helsinki, Department of Slavonic and Baltic Languages and Literatures, 2001 (Selection of papers by Slavists, Baltologists and Balkanists from Austria/Croatia, Canada, Finland, Latvia, Poland, Russia and the United States of America) Halla-aho, Jussi: Old Church Slavic Manual. Helsinki, Jussi Halla-aho, 2006

Political works Halla-aho, Jussi: Kirjoituksia uppoavasta Lännestä, Jussi Halla-aho, 2009 In 2009, Halla-aho published a collection of his web columns titled Kirjoituksia uppoavasta Lännestä (Writings from the sinking West or Writings about the sinking West) in print. The book's first edition sold out in three days.