The leader of the openly ethno-nationalist Finnish Blue-and-Black Movement, Tuukka Kuru, has been charged over an anti-semitic tweet.
The charges were filed at the Satakunta District Court and cover a tweet posted in 2020, where Kuru commented on male circumcision by stating that the "criminalization of Judaism actually sounds quite good". Kuru himself denied the charges.
The circumcision debate in Scandinavia flared up several years ago, when the Danish government mulled banning ritual circumcision for minors, yet backed down, citing the necessity to protect Jewish religious traditions following pressure from international Jewish groups.
Nevertheless, they had a rather unimpressive showing in the recent parliamentary elections, winning a mere 0.1% of the vote, as opposed to their mother party, the Finns, which finished second and have high changes of becoming part of the ruling coalition. Kuru, who was previously quoted about the party maintaining "a racial identity," was a candidate himself, yet received a slim 323 votes in the Uusimaa electoral district.
Just to get registered, the party had to heavily weed out its program. Among other things, it removed the idea of launching an ethnic register, which would have revealed the ethnic, linguistic and religious backgrounds of the people living in Finland.
Despite the party's poor showing, numerous Finnish pundits pointed to the mere fact of the party's registration and participation in the election as the single most critical development on the nationalist fringe of the Finnish political scene, following the ban placed on the Nordic Resistance Movement in 2020. Back then, many experts warned that its members would reorganize and resurface under a different banner.
The party's colors hark back to the openly fascist Lapua Movement that existed between the two world wars and was disbanded in 1932, following a failed coup d'etat. Its successor, the Patriotic People’s Movement, was banned as well, in 1944. The Lapua movement also went down in history for kidnapping and beating opponents and even abducting a popular ex-president, Kaarlo Stahlberg.