1 Overview

In Finland, the EP election day was 26 May 2019, just six weeks after the Finnish parliamentary elections. The political context the 2014 EP elections had been completely different. In 2014, Finland was still suffering from the financial crisis that escalated in the Eurozone after 2008, and the country was ruled by a weak and quarrelsome ‘rainbow’ government with the combination of right- and left-wing parties. The populist Finns Party that broke through in the previous parliamentary elections of 2011 had remained in opposition and strengthened its support. Therefore, the campaigns of the 2014 EP elections focused on the economy and immigration issues promoted especially by the largest opposition parties the Finns Party and the Centre Party.

In contrast, during the 2019 EP elections the recession had been beaten and the economy was not that big an issue – even though it is always a significant theme in Finnish EP election campaigns. The strong right-wing government had ruled the country since 2015, led by the previous election winner the Centre Party. The Finns Party participated in the governing cabinet for the first time in its history, but the party had lost its popularity and split at its 2017 party conference because of the strict austerity policies promoted as part of the right-wing government and the challenges caused by the flow of refugees in 2015–2016. Thus, in 2019 the unpopular government of the Centre Party, the right-wing National Coalition Party and the rump of the former Finns Party members holding on to the governing cabinet was attacked vigorously by the left-green party block and by the new-born Finns Party that had turned from being a traditional agrarian populist movement to a clear nativist radical right party.

However, whereas the ‘refugee crisis’ had become easier and the economy was buoyant, immigration did not feature as a central issue in the campaigns. Instead, climate change and environmental issues seemed to be emphasised, allowing the Finns Party to represent itself as a clear opponent to other political players mainly supporting the national and European policies fighting the climate change. Regarding EU institutions, the Finns Party promoted itself as the only clear anti-EU option in the Finnish party field. Therefore, the 2019 EP election campaign in Finland was characterised by the confrontation between the populist radical right Finns Party and other parties in climate-change, European integration and moral issues. National security and the question of Russia and the European populists’ affinity to this became palpable in the post-election analysis, equally as the climate focus lifting the Greens in both Finland and in Europe.

2 Political Communication in Finland

In Hallin and Mancini’s (2004), pp. 66–71) classification, Finland with other Nordic countries is a typical representative of the Democratic Corporatist Model, in which market-driven and partisan tendencies co-exist in the media system and corporatism and parliamentarianism go hand in hand in politics. However, as Hallin and Mancini (2004, pp. 251–252) state, there has been a shift towards a liberal model in many European countries. This is also true in Finland, where the media system especially has clearly become marketised since the 1990s, meaning the decline of partisan press and political parallelism as well as commercialisation of both broadcasting media and press (Herkman, 2009). At the same time, corporatist consensus in political decision-making has been reduced and parliamentarianism reinforced (Reunanen & Kunelius, 2021).

Even if Finland is similar to other Nordic countries at the systemic level, relying on strong constitutional welfare state and promoting liberal democratic values, it differs from them for cultural, historical and geopolitical reasons. First, the Finnish language differs radically from the Scandinavian language family of Sweden, Norway and Denmark, making Finland a unique cultural sphere in the Nordic region. Second, Finland shares more than 1300 km of its eastern border with the Russian Federation, and in the Second World War, Finland faced a painful war with the invading Soviet Union. This history and geopolitical location have had a major impact on the Finnish economy and foreign policy sometimes called ‘Finlandisation’ (see Maude, 1982). Until the collapse of the Soviet Union, the bilateral trade between Finland and the Soviet Union was the backbone of the Finnish economy. Therefore, it is not surprising that more recently Finland has been a more eager supporter of political and economic federation at the European level than the other Nordic countries have been. Finland has been a full member of the European Union and a member of the European Economic and Monetary Union EMU since 1995, and it is the only Nordic country using the Euro as its currency.

With the other Nordic countries, Finland has been among the strongest print media countries in the world (Wiio & Nordenstreng, 2017, pp. 23–27). The number of newspaper readers is still relatively high in Finland but has decreased radically during the last couple of decades alongside the rapid changes in the media environment. However, even if the print circulations of the most popular daily Helsingin Sanomat and tabloid Ilta-Sanomat – both owned by the media company Sanoma – have decreased by half from the heyday of the 1990s, their readership has increased with online versions, covering even more than 25% of the whole population of 5.5 million inhabitants (see KMT, 2018). In addition, whereas commercial television channels bypassed the public service YLE in the overall audience proportion at the beginning of the 21st century, the most popular individual channel in the digital era is still YLE TV1 with its 27% share of the daily TV watching in 2021 (Finnpanel, 2022).

However, the media environment in Finland has radically changed during the last two decades, and it is under question whether Finland can be called the ‘media welfare state’ similar to other Nordic countries (see Syvertsen et al., 2014). The media landscape in twenty-first century Finland is fragmented, market-driven and increasingly less nationally regulated. Even if the ownership of national media is concentrated under a couple of large media houses, such as Sanoma Media Finland, Alma Media, YLE and Keskisuomalainen (Statistics Finland, 2022a), the proportion of foreign international media conglomerates in Finnish radio, television and press business has increased remarkably after digitalisation. Google, Meta and Twitter held the lion’s share of the Finnish advertising market in the 2020s, and media consumption is highly divided between the generations. The older generations read printed papers and consume public service radio and television, but the younger generations focus on commercial entertainment media in an online environment and spend their time with social media platforms (Statistics Finland, 2022b).

3 Twitter in Finnish Political Communication

Demographically, Twitter is a marginal player in Finland: compared to Facebook that is used by more than half of the Finnish population (5.5 million), or to WhatsApp, YouTube and Instagram, which are especially popular among the younger generations, with its 0.6 million users and 150,000 monthly tweeters Twitter was just the fifth most popular social media platform in Finland in 2020 (Statistics Finland, 2022b). However, as in many other countries, in Finland Twitter has a reputation of being an ‘elite media’, being popular especially among politicians, journalists, activists and various experts (Isotalus et al., 2018; Vainikka & Huhtamäki, 2015). This makes Twitter societally interesting and an important channel for political communication (Strandberg & Carlson, 2021). Finnish cabinet ministers, for example, tend to tweet about their decisions and from their travels, and political actors comment actively their opinions on daily political issues in Twitter.

Studies have shown that social media changed the party field little and had a limited impact on election results before the mid-2010s when Twitter really broke through in Finnish political campaigns (Strandberg, 2013, 2016). After Brexit and Donald Trump’s success in US presidential election of 2016, the view that social media may have a real impact on voter behaviour has increased in Finland (Strandberg & Carlson, 2021), and the success of radical right Finns Party has been linked to social media in public debates. More recently, Twitter’s role in individual Finnish politicians’ communication skills and strategies has been studied (Isotalus, 2017) and Twitter as a part of citizens’ and elites’ political engagement analysed (Vainikka & Huhtamäki, 2015; Isotalus & Paatelainen, 2018; Ruoho & Kuusipalo, 2018).

In our study, three empirical analyses make an interesting reference point: a study of Twitter use in the 2015 Finnish national election (Marttila et al., 2016), a study of Finnish MPs’ regular Twitter use in March–April 2016 (Marttila, 2018) and a study of Twitter use in the Finnish 2014 EP election campaigns (Railo & Vainikka, 2017). However, one has to keep in mind that in those studies, sampling was based on Twitter accounts and the analysis focused on quantitative measurements of users only, whereas our sampling is more thematic based on hashtags and our study includes qualitative analysis of Twitter content.

4 Finnish Political Parties and Populism

Finland is a multi-party democracy having national elections in every four years. Voters vote directly for the candidates, however vote counting is based on proportional representation by political parties in 13 electoral districts. This makes electoral alliances possible, and whereas there is no threshold value restricting representation in parliament, minor political protest movements with a 1 or 2% share of the vote may get into the parliament. This is perhaps one reason why populist political parties have been appearing in the Finnish parliament for quite a long time. Another reason may lie in the consensus tradition of Finnish politics, because the consensual establishment can easily be labelled a ‘corrupt elite’ by populists (Paloheimo, 2012, p. 329).

The first political party described as populist in Finland was the Finnish Rural Party (SMP), established in 1959 as a response to rapid urbanisation and industrialisation after the Second World War. SMP was a true representative of ‘agrarian populism’ (Taggart, 2000) in the 1960s and 1970s, supported especially by small farmers who broke away from the Agrarian Party, the predecessor to today’s Centre Party. However, SMP declined during the 1980s and became bankrupt after the 1995 parliamentary elections, in which the party won only one seat. Since that there has been one political party commonly called populist, namely the Finns Party (Perussuomalaiset), originally called in English the True Finns, and established in 1995 as a successor party to SMP.

The Finns Party remained a minor player in the Finnish political field for several years, with one or two members of parliament. However, the party enjoyed success in the 2008 local elections, with a large field of candidates, and in the ‘big bang’ parliamentary elections of 2011 the party surprised everyone by receiving 19.1% of the vote (Arter, 2012; Borg, 2012). The party refused offers to join the government and remained in opposition, securing 17.7% of popular support in the 2015 elections. However, after the 2015 elections Finns Party opted to participate in the conservative right-wing government. At the 2017 party conference, the party split when Jussi Halla-aho and his followers were elected as party leaders. Since then, Finns Party has continued in opposition as a clearly radical right party with a nativist agenda, becoming the second largest parliamentary party in the 2019 elections with 17.5% of the vote (see Table 4.1). In some party polls taken in 2020 and in 2021, the Finns Party was even the largest party in Finland with support rate of more than 20%. In the 2023 parliamentary elections, the Finns Party was the second largest with 20.1% of the vote, and after historically long negotiations the party joined the conservative right-wing government of Petteri Orpo (National Coalition), first time with its new leadership and nativist orientation.

Table 4.1 Proportion of the votes (%) per party in Finnish national elections of twenty-first century
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Until the 2011 parliamentary elections the party system in Finland had been stable and ‘enduring’ for several decades (Sundberg, 1999), having three major parties – the leftist Social Democratic Party, the conservative Centre Party and the right-wing National Coalition Party – that used to share political power and take turns in governing cabinet and opposition as leading parties. The Finns Party shook this status quo in the 2011 elections, snatching votes especially from Centre Party in province and from the Social Democratic Party in smaller industrial towns. However, it was not until the 2017 party split when other parties started to avoid the Finns Party. Even if many members of the party had already been openly xenophobic and even racist during the early 2010s, leading to several public scandals and court cases linked to their unacceptable behaviour or comments (Herkman, 2018), the long history of agrarian populism has made Finns Party into a legitimate player in Finnish political field.

After the split, Finns party clearly turned into a typical radical right party with a strong emphasis on nativist ideology and on an anti-immigration approach (e.g., Norocel, 2017). The turn has further polarised the Finnish party field, seen in the latest national and EP elections, in which Centre Party especially and other moderate parties have lost their support and more radical players increased their popularity. In addition to the Centre Party, the Social Democrats Party has been among the losers, whereas the Finns Party and the Greens have been the most significant winners. It seems that traditional class-based orientation between the left and the right has given room for moral-based politics between conservative and liberal approaches – although in the 2023 parliament elections the division between the left and the right raised its head again. However, perhaps surprisingly the only clear representative of Euroscepticism in Finland, the Finns Party (see Herkman, 2017), has not been as successful in EP elections as it has been in national elections (see Table 4.2) – indicating the continuing support of the European federation even in times of increasing nationalist spirit.

Table 4.2 Proportion of the votes (%) per party in Finnish EP elections of twenty-first century
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5 Twitter in the EP 2019 Elections

The EP elections were held on 26 May 2019. Twitter data around the elections was collected for the period 1–31 May to cover the intensive phase of the campaign and the immediate aftermath of the election. The sample collected by hashtags linked to EP elections and focused on the most recognised and circulated accounts (from sampling, see Chap. 1). The sample contained 4211 tweets sent from 123 separate Twitter accounts by various political actors. About one-quarter (24.3%) of the tweets were sent from the account of a political party, and more than three-quarters (75.7%) were sent by individual politicians, demonstrating that the Finnish election system emphasises individual candidates and the role of Twitter as a special form of political ‘mass self-communication’ (Castells, 2009).

The party affiliations in the tweets closely reflect the results of the election. Almost one-third of the tweets (31.6%) were affiliated with the election winner, the National Coalition Party. The second common affiliation was with the Greens (16.9% of the tweets) which also came second in the number of election votes. The affiliation with the Finns Party (9.5%) was third and the Social Democrats (8.3%) fourth most common in single tweets. The party affiliations are similar to those in other election studies indicating that especially the members of National Coalition and Greens have been active tweeters (Marttila, 2018, pp. 75–80; Railo & Vainikka, 2017, pp. 95–100).

However, a significant number of the party affiliations could not be classified in connection with the successful parties in the elections: almost one-fifth (19.4%) of the tweets did not have that kind of party affiliation. This is because the minor parties with no representation in national parliament such as the Pirate Party, the Feminist Party and the Communist Party – and their members who cannot afford large campaigns in mainstream media – eagerly exploit all opportunities provided by social media for political campaigning. In these ‘bottom-up movements’ social media platforms create an inherent platform for political participation. There were also a few individuals who were very active in Twitter during the 2019 EP election campaigns, who represented even more extreme ideas about immigration and nationalism than the Finns Party, with no clear affiliation to political parties.

More than half of the sampled tweets were sent from accounts located either ‘generally in Finland’ or in the capital area of the country that dominates Finnish political life. This has also been typical in previous election campaigns in which Twitter has appeared as a forum used especially by politicians from metropolitan capital area (Marttila et al., 2016, p. 124; Railo & Vainikka, 2017, p. 96). However, in the 2019 EP election a remarkable number of tweets were also from major Finnish cities other than Helsinki, such as Oulu, Tampere and Turku.

In this study, a striking feature in account locations was a significant number of tweets posted from the Northern part of the country: 11% of all tweets came from Rovaniemi or Oulu – both marginal regions in their Twitter usage during the 2014 EP Elections (Railo & Vainikka, 2017, p. 96) or in the 2015 national elections (Marttila et al., 2016, pp. 124–126). This highlights a clear division between the capital metropolitan area and the provinces, which has been a typical watershed in populist antagonisms around the world (e.g., Norris & Inglehart, 2019; Arndt, 2016).

The accounts of political parties themselves were among the more active, even though most of the tweets were sent by individual politicians, highlighting the nature of Twitter as an individualised form of political communication (Marttila et al., 2016, p. 70). The election winner, the right-wing National Coalition was by far the most active tweeter, whereas the party’s own account delivered an average of ten tweets per day during the campaign month (302 in total). Also, the Christian Democrats’, the Centre Party’s and Social Democrats’ Twitter accounts were among the top-10 in terms of messaging activity, all sending nearly 100 tweets during the campaign month. The Finns Party’s and the Greens party accounts were not that active, sending both about 55 tweets during the month and being ranked around twentieth in their tweeting activity. In these parties, individual politicians appeared much more active than the party organisation.

Individual politicians of NC were also very active in their tweeting. Two third of the top-10 active individual tweeters were members of NC (see Table 4.3). None of them represented the very establishment of the party elite except Henna Virkkunen, who had worked as a Minister in three separate governments in 2008–2014 and as a member of the European Parliament (MEP) since 2014. The other active tweeters from the party were youngish mid-career politicians.

Table 4.3 Top-10 individual tweeters in Finnish EP election campaigns (N = 4211)
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These politicians have been active in social media, especially in Twitter, which might derive from their position: they had to make use of social media in their campaigns, because they did not have as many resources for campaigning in other forums as the more established members of the party. However, as National Coalition has been most professional and seemingly the most successful among all Finnish political parties in its political communication during the twenty-first century (e.g., Herkman, 2011), the division of labour in election campaigns might also have been strategically planned to gain the most visibility for the party via various media platforms.

In general, traditional mainstream parties and their members were much more active tweeters than the right-wing populist actors, and one can claim that liberal pro-EU voices dominated the tweets during the Finnish EP election campaigns. Our sampling procedure emphasising election hashtags may bias the result, but it is in line with previous studies showing also that members of National Coalition and Greens have been most active tweeters and that Twitter has been favoured especially by younger and female politicians who benefit most because it can be used for free (Strandberg, 2016; Railo & Vainikka, 2017). In our study, the liberal Greens Party was well represented among the party affiliations of the sample tweets alongside the strongly pro-EU National Coalition. The most active tweeter from Finns Party was Laura Korpinen, ranked eighth as an individual tweeter. Half of the top-10 tweeters were female and half male, but out of the top-20 tweeters, most tweeters were female.

However, some conservative and radical actors were highly active in Twitter campaigns too. As mentioned, the Finns Party appeared as the third most common party affiliation in the tweets, and the Christian Democrats (a minor conservative player in the Finnish political field), showed a relatively high level of activity in its Twitter campaign. Even more striking was the activity linked to the Pirate Party and to some local activists such as Junes Lokka, who is a radical nationalist and anti-immigration activist in Oulu, in northern Finland. He has been elected to the Oulu municipal council but was convicted in court of agitation against an ethnic group and charged with defamation of character. He is seemingly too provocative to have any official party affiliations. Thus, one can claim that Twitter campaigning was favoured especially by political actors who are used to being active in social media, who do not have sufficient resources for more traditional campaigns, and/or who want to provoke and bypass the control of the traditional journalistic media.

The picture changes radically compared to the original tweeting activity if we look at the retweets (see Table 4.4) and commenting. If the number of tweets provides an explanation of the overall activity in political campaigning, retweets can be seen as an indicator of efficiency of the original tweets. They show that the tweet has drawn attention and spread in Twitter’s user network or even more generally in the ‘hybrid media system’ (Chadwick, 2013).

Table 4.4 The 10 most retweeted tweets in Finland (N = 4211)
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Among the most retweeted tweets can be found several messages from some of the leading figures from the political parties and especially of Finnish political communication in Twitter. In these cases, the number of retweets correlates with the account’s popularity in Twitter during the elections. For example, among the top-20 retweeted account owners were Alexander Stubb, the former MEP, leader of National Coalition and Prime Minister of Finland; Pekka Haavisto, the leader (during the 2019 EP elections) and a very popular president candidate of Greens; Pekka Sauri, the former leader (1991–1993) of Greens and former deputy mayor (2003–2017) of Helsinki; Ville Niinistö, the former leader and current MEP of the Greens; and Petteri Orpo, the former Minister of Finance and current leader of National Coalition.

However, their messages were mostly simple encouragements to vote and to create a positive spirit around the elections shared and liked actively by their party members. Therefore, more interesting are perhaps the tweets sent by much less established politicians with fewer followers. For example, Laura Korpinen (Finns Party) had only about 1500 followers during the EP elections, and Riikka Purra (Finns Party), Oula Silvennoinen (Greens), Tiia Lehtonen (Left Alliance), Henri Ramberg (Left Alliance) and Junes Lokka (nationalist activist) had a couple of thousand followers. Yet, some of their tweets were widely noticed and among the top-20 retweeted messages. Even if we have to keep in mind differences in sampling procedures, somehow this result is reminiscent of the result of the study of the Twitter usage by four known European populist figures, indicating that ‘more is less’: the more messages published in Twitter meant less impact on the public (Alonso-Muñoz & Casero-Ripollés, 2018, p. 1198).

From all 4211 original tweets, 65 were retweeted at least 20 times. From these 12 were originally sent by a political actor affiliated with National Coalition, but 20 were affiliated with the Greens and 17 with the Finns Party. Nine of much retweeted tweets were affiliated with Left Alliance. In addition, two of these 65 tweets were affiliated with the Social Democrats, the Pirate Party and Junes Lokka respectively. Thus, retweeting supports the idea of two antagonist alliances, the liberal left-green and the conservative populist radical right groups, mainly circulating and confronting their views in Twitter campaigns.

6 Themes in the EP 2019 Election Twitter Campaigns

To analyse the content of the tweets in more detail, a word frequency analysis was conducted on all 4211 sample tweets. The most common words, such as verbs like ‘to be’ or ‘to have’ and conjunctions like ‘and’ were removed from the sample to focus on actual words of political communication. There are no prepositions or articles in the Finnish language, but inflectional suffixes cause trouble in this kind of vocabulary analysis. In total, 73,149 words were used in a dataset sieved out from the tweets. The analysis was focused on the 300 most used words by the various political parties, meaning that about one-third of the whole word corpus.

We used automated and manual categorisation to find the themes repeated in the tweets. The words were clustered into to the themes, and the popularity of the themes was ranked. For example, lemmatisation had already combined several typing versions of the EP elections, but words linked to voting and other election practices were manually sorted into the same theme. The same is true with themes of Europeanism, Finnishness, immigration and climate change. The main themes repeated in the tweets are crystallised in a Table 4.5. However, particularities within and outside the themes are opened up in a main text in a more detailed manner.

Table 4.5 Proportion of themes (%) and their ranking per political party in word frequency analysisa
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Basically, it is not a surprise that vocabularies concentrating on EP elections and Europe dominated the tweets because of our sampling procedure. By far the most popular words repeated in all parties’ tweets concerned the EP elections. Vocabulary discussing the European Union and its institutions such as the European Parliament was also among the top five themes in all other parties’ tweets except those of the Finns Party members who did not use European vocabulary as eagerly as other political parties. It seems that outside the election frame, the Finns Party did not discuss both absolutely and relatively as much Europe and EU as especially Left-Green block and National Coalition did. There were also qualitative differences between the parties in this: whereas the Finns Party discussed Eurocriticism relatively often, the National Coalition discussed the Eurozone and the Social Democrats discussed Brexit.

Finland and Finnishness were popular words in all parties’ tweets, but the Left Alliance’s members used nationalist vocabulary much less. Also, the Greens seldom used national vocabulary. However, a national approach was favoured by all political parties in the sense that other countries’ names were mentioned just a few times in their tweets. The most common country name was Russia, which was discussed in some of the tweets from the Finns Party, the National Coalition and the Left Alliance mainly in the framework of Finnish security and trade policies. NC seemed to promote especially critical approach to Russia, whereas the Finns Party represented more positive tone in this. In addition, Germany and Sweden were mentioned in a few tweets with affiliation to Greens and parties above, but in general, Finnish party members’ approaches to EP elections were nationally-oriented in their Twitter campaigns.

The title of their own party was, of course, commonly repeated in the tweets. Names of the party leaders were repeated in vocabularies and discussion chains too. In addition, names of the former and current MEPs were commonly mentioned, and Twitter seemed to serve an especially popular forum for younger party officers and politicians promoting their emerging careers. All parties except the Centre Party gave a lot of room for these young active tweeters. The tweets linked to the Centre Party were concentrated almost solely around the leader of the party and a former Prime Minister Juha Sipilä. This may derive partly from our sampling, but it could also indicate the campaign strategy, since Sipilä had been a leading figure in the Finnish political public sphere for some time and an active tweeter himself, and the party obviously tried to take advantage of this in its campaign.

An interesting result was seen in reference to the names of other parties and their members that were rare except in tweets affiliated with the Finns Party. In these tweets, Social Democrats and their members were most often mentioned. Mikael Näkkäläjärvi, the leader of the Social Democrats’ youth organisation and a local councillor from the North Finland, was especially targeted even more often than the Finns Party’s own MEPs or the leader of the Social Democratic Party, Antti Rinne. The popularity of Näkkäläjärvi’s name in the Finns Party’s tweets was derived from the media revelations about him being convicted of drink driving and animal cruelty during his adolescence. Members of the Finns Party were circulating and having fun with these news stories mocking the very liberal Näkkäläjärvi.

The names of other parties’ members were all but absent in tweets affiliated with the Centre Party and the Social Democrats, and relatively rare also in the tweets from the Greens, the National Coalition and the Left Alliance. If these parties referred to other parties, they commonly mention the Finns Party. In the National Coalition’s tweets, Hungarian Fidesz was also mentioned a few times, and in the Left Alliance’s tweets, ‘far right movements’ in general were mentioned even more often, because some liberal members of these parties worried about the rising nationalist radical right parties.

What comes to the more specific themes, they followed the agendas commonly linked to particular political party programmes. Not very surprisingly, immigration was among the top-5 themes of the Finns Party, when the terms combining the topic with exile, border control and debate over alleged sexual crimes refugees committed in the Oulu region were put together. In turn, the Greens dominated discussions on climate change in their tweets, but the relative proportion of this theme was even higher in tweets affiliated with the Left Alliance. Younger voters had a particular emphasis in the Greens campaign, and the Finns Party members paid the least attention to Finnish youth.

All parties except for the Centre Party and the Left Alliance used significantly vocabulary linked to the media in their tweets, but there were clear differences in this between the others and the Finns Party. Whereas other parties mainly advertised forthcoming TV campaign debates and panel discussions, members of the Finns Party wrote about unjust news stories, hate speech debates and freedom of speech. This has been a typical communication strategy of radical right parties who have emphasised their ‘underdog’ position in relation to ‘mainstream media’ (Mazzoleni, 2014). Opposite to this, the NC discussed the need for fact checking in its tweets. Most of the media mentions were linked to the national public service broadcasting company YLE, but the Social Democrats also mentioned Finnish commercial television channel MTV3 and social media.

Themes other than those classified in Table 4.5 were quite difficult to discern by the word frequency analysis, because their vocabularies were multiple and could have been linked to several topics. However, it became clear that particular words were emphasised rather traditionally in regard to the left-right division of politics. The leftist party members, for example, repeated such words as equality, human rights and welfare in their tweets. The rightist party members, in turn, used words linked to business enterprises more often than those of the other parties. The Greens repeated words such as globe and global, especially in relation to climate change. The word democracy was seen, but seldomly, in tweets affiliated with parties other than the Finns Party, whose members commonly used vocabulary emphasising political contestations. Generally, these differences support the traditional division between right- and left-wing parties and their confrontation with the radical right Finns Party.

7 Topic Modelling of the EP 2019 Tweets

Topic modelling analysis of the Twitter data was undertaken to find out how discursive battles took place and the relationality of themes was established in Twitter. Topic modelling also enables the timeline of the campaign debates by timings the trending topics to be mapped.

Political debates on the election day included climate change and climate and the Greens were trending topics. Discussing climate, nature, nature conservation, forests and sustainable development brought together actors in Finnish development cooperation, the Pirate Party and the EU. This was stimulated by discussions on the ethos of the imminent annual World Village festival prior to the elections (Fig. 4.1).

Fig. 4.1
A multiline graph plots the trends of election debates in Finland between the first of May and the thirty-first of May. The fluctuating lines are numbered 1 to 70. The lines form large peaks between the twenty-fifth and twenty-eighth of May.

Election debates through topic peaks in May 2019 in Finland

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The most prominent post-election topic also mentioned several MEPs, climate active youth and others in connection with climate change on 27 May. Another topic that trended both before and after the voting date combined references to the economy, the National Coalition Party, the Centre Party, PM Juha Sipilä, but also the Finns Party, its leader Jussi Halla-aho and Russia and national security. Another topic relating to the Greens was strong after the elections, with emphasis on the EU and Germany, where the Greens gained good results. The Greens and the National Coalition -related topics that included vocabulary of cooperation, unity, ours, strong, Finland, and Europe were trending throughout, the National Coalition particularly strong prior to the advance voting, indicating the election results.

All five runs of the topics closed to National Coalition -related accounts emphasised on ‘us’ and togetherness the most in Finland. These references are visible in the topics even regarding the leftist parties, the Centre Party and the Greens, but completely absent from the Finns Party tweets. Thus, for the Finnish radical right populists, people in the meaning of nation or ethnically patriotic would appear near enough to their core, but the topics that include the ‘us’ vocabulary were used by them less often. In turn, regarding other political parties, the nation/people vocabulary was not strong, but the ‘us’ meant Europe, common climate politics and human rights. Therefore, the plural first person was used by the National Coalition in particular, while it was not used for the political identifications of the Finns Party. This highlights the strong campaign tweeting of the National Coalition above the other parties, but also the building of a very different political frontier by the Finns Party.

The analysis of party specific keywords in topic modelling repeats the results of thematic analysis above. Not surprisingly, the issue of climate dominates the closest topics to the Greens, but it seems to become a hegemonic topic also for the other mainstream parties, especially the Left Alliance, SDP, the National Coalition and the Centre Party, supporting the impact that climate change was the prime topic in the Finnish 2019 EP elections. All these parties also were linked to topics such as human rights, equality and education, promoted most prominently in relation to the left and the Greens, whereas the National Coalition and the Centre Party were linked to the economy, entrepreneurship, the internal market, Russia and national security, National Coalition especially in connection to the idea of United Europe. The vocabulary of the Left Alliance and the Greens also linked human rights, freedom of speech and civil society seemingly negatively to the Finns Party’s patriotism, and to populism, nationalism, lobbying and trolls in general. The Finns Party’s nodal points, in turn, included words such as hate speech, freedom of speech, migration and migrants, extreme right and Russia.

For different parties beyond the campaign topics, we could recognise some substance topics that also unveil relationality. The National Coalition’s key campaign topics on the pro-EU stance included strong Europe. The substance topics reveal contrasts between Russia and EU membership and the Finns Party and National Coalition, but also education and the far right. In addition, the climate is linked to education and the knowledge base, science as well as industry, human rights and even to mental health. The Social Democratic Party’s core campaign topics included Brexit in connection with freedom of movement, workers, climate and gender equality. The EU and the internal market are also related to equality, human rights and mobility. Therefore, the relationships between the topics tend to combine the traditional party agendas into either liberal or conservative approaches of human rights and climate change in a way that mainstream parties mainly represented liberal and the Finns Party conservative values in these combinations.

Going back to the formula of populism adapted here, the Finns Party focused on frontier building, where as the positive ‘us’ references was highlighted by the National Coalition, but Europe was also among the signifiers of togetherness for the other parties from the Social Democratic Party to the Centre, the Greens and the Left Alliance. What tied together and worked as a frontier concept was climate and to some degree, national security. The Finns Party’s claim on closing the borders and Eurosceptic discourse worked in this sense as a contrast to all the other parties.

8 Twitter Networks in the EP 2019 Elections

The network analysis demonstrates interestingly that the Twitter users with the highest numbers of followers were not the most important nodes in EP election campaigns. For example, Alexander Stubb (National Coalition) with almost 370,000 followers or Pekka Sauri (Greens) with more than 100,000 followers were ranked as thirtieth and as fiftieth respectively by their betweenness centrality. This is different from the 2014 elections in which Stubb was a candidate and the most reflected individual in the Twittersphere (Railo & Vainikka, 2017, p. 99). Similarly, many of the most active tweeters, such as the National Coalition, were not among the top-influencers in Twitter communication during the EP elections. Rather, individual experts of EU politics, be they former or current MEPs or EU officers, and political activists specialised in social media and Twitter communication, had the most important status in Twitter network during the EP elections (see Fig. 4.2).

Fig. 4.2
A keyword cluster network visualization for the top Twitter users in Finland during the elections. The nodes have user names in a foreign language.

Top-10 network in Twitter during the EP elections, Finland

Full size image

According to our analysis, by far the most influential actor in Finnish Twitter network was Heidi Hautala, Hautala has been a Greens MEP for more than 15 years, and she has been the highly esteemed Deputy Speaker of the European Parliament since 2017. The next important figure according to our network analysis was Ville Niinistö, the former leader and current Greens’ MEP.

The other top-10 influencers in the network were mainly female and former or current MEPs such as Silvia Modig (Left Alliance), Henna Virkkunen (National Coalition), Sari Essayah (Christian Democrats) and Miapetra Kumpula-Natri (Social Democrats). Aura Salla (National Coalition) has worked as an expert in the EU Commission, and Petrus Pennanen, the leader of Pirate Party, has been very active in social media campaigns. Finns Party members in the top-10 ranking were Laura Korpinen (ninth) and Laura Huhtasaari (tenth). Korpinen is a party activist who specialises in Twitter and social media campaigns, Huhtasaari was a vice president of the party and a current MEP.

However, what is interesting is that most of the top-10 nodes in the network were passive as tweeters, and nor were their tweets retweeted that often. From these nodes only the leader of Pirate Party, Petrus Pennanen, the National Coalition’s MEP Henna Virkkunen, the National Coalition’s party activist Aura Salla and the Finns Party’s activist Laura Korpinen were among the top-10 tweeters (see Table 4.3), whereas only the tweets by Korpinen and the Left Alliance MEP Silvia Modig’s tweets were among the most retweeted messages (see Table 4.4). Thus, even though Hautala, Niinistö and other significant nodes in the network were quite active, their role seemed to serve as communication hubs for retweeting and delivering messages rather than being active constructors of the discussion. In this sense, the role of Korpinen (Finns Party) and Modig (Left Alliance), for example, looked relatively more active in the network.

In general, the network analysis demonstrates that communication tended to focus on separate clusters or bubbles that did not overlap very much. The actors mentioned above worked mainly as bridges (or nodes) between alterntive political approaches and competing ideologies in the network. The overall communication volume in the network was dominated by liberal and pro-EU actors, and EU critical and extreme nationalist actors played a minor role. Thus, our network analysis does not support the idea of a strong spread of a radical right agenda among different political players. Instead, as with the national election campaign in 2015 (Marttila et al., 2016) it reveals a high degree of separation between the political actors, typical for political marketing and campaigning in which differentiation between the actors and views is essential. The most radical voices in the network seemed to belong to the actors not explicitly affiliated with the political parties.

9 Conclusion

We found that most active Twitter users during the campaigns represented liberal and pro-EU political parties, the Greens and the National Coalition. Twitter was also favoured by younger politicians and political officers, and representation of female politicians was relatively high in Twitter campaigns. These results are in line with other studies on the use of Twitter in Finnish election campaigns and political communication (Strandberg, 2016; Marttila et al., 2016; Railo & Vainikka, 2017; Marttila, 2018). The Finns Party, instead, has been connected to the Finnish anti-immigration blogosphere, Facebook and discussion forums, whereas Twitter has been described as being an elite platform. However, our analysis reveals that the Finns Party has strengthened its position in the Finnish Twittersphere compared to the 2014 EP elections, in which the party seemed passive and marginal (Railo & Vainikka, 2017, 97). In the 2019 elections, especially youngish female social media activist Laura Korpinen, but also a successful MEP candidate Laura Huhtasaari, ranked high in their Twitter activity and changed the Finns Party’s male-dominated campaign in the 2014 elections.

The different sampling procedures may explain some of the results, but according to our analysis one can claim that in five years, the radical right Finns Party had increased its Twitter status among the other parties in EP election campaigns. However, this does not mean that the party had changed its agenda to make it more like other parties’ agendas. The thematic analysis of word frequencies revealed the nationalist emphasis, concentration on immigration agendas and clear confrontation with especially leftist parties and legacy media. This was different compared to the thematic emphases in tweets affiliated with other political parties, but in line with studies demonstrating that radical right parties do not reduce their nationalist and immigration agendas after election success and established status in the party field (Akkerman et al., 2016).

The main result in the study of Twitter usage in the 2015 Finnish national elections was that the structure of Twitter campaigns was highly clustered: the political Twittersphere was structured by separate networks or filter bubbles around different political parties that did not discuss much with each other (Marttila et al., 2016, pp. 129–132). This was also true in the 2019 EP elections, in which the National Coalition and Greens dominated the Twittersphere with their own networks that other parties accompanied with their bubbles. Even if all parties had some members whose Twitter accounts worked as a kind of ‘supernodes’ with significant intermediary traffic, the big picture of Twitter networks was fragmented and separated around different political actors.

Therefore, the Twittersphere indicates high external but low internal pluralism in Finnish political communication, typical to the Democratic Corporatist Model (Hallin & Mancini, 2004, p. 188). However, according to our study rather than ‘shifted towards moderate pluralism’, as Hallin and Mancini (2004, p. 191) suggested, Finnish political communication has more recently turned towards polarised pluralism. The reason for this is obviously the Finns Party that relies on strong populist antagonisms and confrontations with other political players. In our data, the constellation was evident especially in confrontations between some Finns Party members and representatives of the Left, and in critical notices of the Finns Party and raising radical right forces by other political parties. In this sense, populism as such has apparently become mainstream in Finland, because the overall political Twittersphere is adopting the populist logic of antagonism in which the Finns Party is represented as an opposite to all other political players. However, in our typology of populism, the confronting constellation between the Finns Party and other political parties is typical of fringe populism.

Compared to the 2014 EP elections, the change was seen in increased Twitter activity of Northern Finland politicians, for example. Even if Twitter is still predominantly a platform of urban and youngish actors, our data brings out the increasing antagonism between the metropolitan capital area and provincial Finland. Thus, whereas Railo and Vainikka (2017, p. 100) concluded their analysis of 2014 EP elections by saying that ‘Twitter seems to be an instrument that reinforces existing structures of power, rather than challenges them, and therefore in line with the normalisation hypothesis’, our analysis indicates that social media may transfer political communication structures in Democratic Corporatist system.

The confrontational political communication would have been highlighted even more if our analysis had focused on those political actors not affiliated with established political parties. The clear representatives of far-right nationalism, extreme feminism and the far-left were left out of our detailed party-based analysis. However, the proportion of these non-affiliated political actors from the whole sample was significant (almost one-fifth) that tells us about the increasing re-politicisation of Finnish public sphere. As Hatakka (2019) has demonstrated, in the hybrid media environment the extreme voices tend to become stronger, because the logic of the whole media system is based on attention economy emphasising antagonisms.

It would be a mistake to make far-reaching conclusions about Finnish political communication by Twitter data concentrating on EP elections only. Twitter is favoured by young activists, political elites and journalists. Twitter does not settle the elections, nor reveal the election campaigns the whole truth of political communication. However, Twitter can be considered to be part of a hybrid media environment highlighting new tendencies in political communication, and elections can be seen as a condensed moment in this communication. As such, our analysis of the Finnish Twittersphere during the 2019 EP elections is revealing. According to it, the radical right Finns Party has not reduced its populist antagonisms, and other political parties have not significantly adopted its agendas and views. On the contrary, Finnish political communication has become more confrontational and adopted the populist logic of antagonisms in which the Finns Party plays a significant role.

The analysis shows how Europe worked as a common signifier for all the other parties, and climate was a key signifier throughout our data. However, the focused campaign rhetoric around ‘us’ was interestingly the strongest with the NC, but also with other pro-European parties, contrasting their rhetoric on Euroscepticism and borders closures related to the Finns Party. This ‘anti-populist’ emphasis paradoxically indicates the increasing populist antagonism between political players in the field of Finnish political communication as a whole.