Do we like them?

Do we like Riikka Purra?

Our score: 2 out of 10. She apologised for old anti-immigrant posts but later defended a party colleague's remarks about immigrants, and we found no real good to set against that.

Riikka Purra leads the Finns Party, Finland's hard-right, anti-immigration party, and has been Finance Minister since the 2023 coalition government formed. She took the party leadership from Jussi Halla-aho, whose blog is where the trouble in her past began. Her upbringing and early career are a gap in what we could open this round, so we won't guess at them.

The big scandal hit in July 2023. Old comments from 2008, posted under the username “riikka” on Halla-aho's blog, surfaced. They were accused of containing anti-immigrant and anti-Islam material, racial slurs and threats of violence. At first she neither confirmed nor denied writing them, and said she wouldn't consider apologising for things said years and decades ago.

Under our harm test, an apology only counts if what comes after it changes. In August 2025 she told Helsingin Sanomat that party deputy chair Teemu Keskisarja had not spoken about immigrants' human dignity in a disparaging way. She read his comments as criticism of low-productivity economic immigration. Keskisarja had called immigrants “low-quality newcomers” on Yle and said that “population replacement” is true. She did say she didn't find all his word choices sensible. Defending those remarks is a long way from a clean break.

We found nothing on her record on LGBTQ+ or trans rights this time, and no climate position of her own. We also found no court outcomes and no verified charity or kind acts, and that gap matters because the scale needs real good alongside harm to score higher. Nothing recent has turned up that would change the picture, but our search was cut short, so treat this as a partial file.

So where does that leave us? She owned up to the 2008 posts and apologised, which counts for something. But a running defence of rhetoric about immigrants, from someone who runs a party built on immigration politics, is the sort of thing that keeps this a no. Fans of her economic politics may see it differently, but that's not what we're scoring here.