Finland finds itself at an ideological crossroads. April’s election produced a right-of-center government in coalition with a Euroskeptic junior partner. Anti-immigrant rhetoric has increased — although not quite to the levels seen elsewhere in Europe — and Ozan Yanar has been visibly promoting multiculturalism and tolerance.

The 28-year-old Yanar, born in Turkey, moved to Finland at 14. Today, he’s a freshman MP, elected for Helsinki on the Green Party list, one of two new immigrant MPs. While politicians born in Sweden or Estonia have been elected to the Finnish Parliament before, none were so obviously “foreign” as the newly elected duo from Turkey and Afghanistan.

Involved in politics at Helsinki University, Yanar beat the odds of the Finnish electoral system in his first attempt. Aspiring MPs in the capital must usually endure several fruitless local, national or European campaign cycles before they get enough name recognition to land a seat in Parliament.

“I’d say 95 percent of the responses are very positive, a lot of people stopping me on the streets. People who’d like to have an international, open and forwardlooking Finland have been incredibly supportive,” Yanar says.

But there’s a certain swath of Finland that’s not fond of Yanar, perhaps because he accused a populist politician of being “cut from the same cloth” as Islamists during a parliamentary debate on marriage equality. “The negative responses have been ‘go back to your country’ kind of messages. Sometimes my mailbox is full of these,” laments Yanar.

“Finns with migrant backgrounds have been living in this country for a very long time,” says Yanar. “You can see them everywhere in Finnish society these days. This is why I find it really odd when the rhetoric of immigration is ‘we’ and ‘them.’”

Your advertising slogan for Europe. Not perfect, but a work in progress.

Which historical figure do you most admire? Martin Luther King.

If you weren’t from Finland, what other nationality would you be? Italian. They have pretty good football teams, very nice food and a Mediterranean mentality that I love. And they surely have also lots of things in politics to fix.

 

This article was updated to accurately reflect Finland’s open-list electoral system. A previous version implied political parties have a say over which of their candidates is elected. In fact, voters choose their representatives directly.

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