Racism and rape fantasies: The PR headache facing Finland's new right-wing government

As Finland's new coalition government is sworn into office on Tuesday, incoming Prime Minister Petteri Orpo is facing a public relations headache over the Speaker of Parliament and the Minister for Economic Affairs, both positions filled by the far-right Finns Party.

In Finland, it's no secret that Jussi Halla-aho, a previous leader of the Finns Party, a former MEP and now in a senior role as Speaker of the House, has a decades-long track record of racist comments, and deeply troubling writings. 

The blog posts, written years before he was in the public eye, contain disturbing insights into the worldview which has shaped his politics, and even brought him convictions for 'disturbing religious worship' and 'ethnic agitation' for which he was fined by the Finnish Supreme Court. 

Among hundreds of blog posts over the years, Halla-aho wrote in June 2006 that Islam is a "religion of pedophiles," and the Prophet Mohammed "was a pedophile."

He said that "robbing passers-by" was a "genetic trait" of Somalis.

In 2006 he implied he would be "exclusively happy if a 'gang of immigrants' raped" a Green party MP. 

"I still and will continue to sincerely and wholeheartedly believe that if a woman who opposes the deportation of immigrant rapists is raped by an immigrant rapist, it is a happy thing," he later wrote.

Halla-aho has also targeted Finland's LGBTQ+ community.

"Violence is an underrated problem-solving tool today," he wrote in November 2008, during a discussion on the shooting of a gay man in Helsinki. 

A Finnish court ordered some of the most egregious comments to be deleted, while others were scrubbed by the author, but many more can still be found online.

Halla-aho has never apologised for his earlier writing. 

"Their whole mode of