Finland has long been seen as a haven of progressive values — a perception earned through its strong welfare and education offers since the postwar decades. However, its right-wing coalition government, headed by Prime Minister Petteri Orpo of the center-right National Coalition Party and his deputy premier, Riikka Purra of the right-populist Finns Party, has set about imposing austerity. The plans mean harsh cuts across the country’s public services.

Next in line are cuts to culture, with €18 million to be slashed from arts funding next year, and more to follow in 2026. This is a drop in the ocean in terms of overall spending — but will heavily impact cultural provision, making the proposed cuts appear ideologically targeted. In the short term, the plans threaten theater and music production, although with Purra stating during a leaders’ debate in 2023 that she sees the arts as a “luxury,” it would appear that the government views culture in the widest sense as a target.

This is not an unusually Finnish affair. Cultural practitioners lean left, so they tend to often be an early casualty of right-wing austerity measures. Indeed, we saw this already in the United Kingdom under the Tory/Liberal Democrat coalition in the 2010s and in the United States during Donald Trump’s first term.

A campaign has been started to oppose what is being portrayed as a dangerous threat to Finland’s cultural independence. The Sakset seis (in English “Cut the Cuts”) campaign is centered upon a Great Culture Petition, which its organizers hope will force a change in the government’s cultural policy. The petition’s name draws upon the Great Petition of 1899, signed by more than half a million people opposed to the tsarist rule of Emperor Nicholas II and the limits he imposed on Finnish autonomy.

That petition entered the Finnish historical consciousness as instrumental in the independence movement, even though the tsar refused to meet the five-hundred-strong delegation that traveled to present it to him. The Sakset seis petition was presented to the Finnish Parliament on December 5 following a public concert nearby on Kansalaistori Square between Oodi — Helsinki’s impressive new library — and Musiikkitalo, its concert hall. At that time, it had over ninety thousand signatories, in a country of just 5.5 million people.

Connecting the anti-cuts movement to Finland’s existential struggle in the tsarist period is a move aimed at drawing cross-sectional support. While it opposes government cuts, Sakset seis is keen to point out that it is nonpartisan, a point that Hanna Kosonen — cofounding member of Sakset seis and secretary general of Forum Artis, a cooperative of arts organizations — emphasized to me in our telephone interview. The campaign insists that an “Independent Finland cannot exist without a culture of its own,” positing the cuts as a threat to the Finnish way of life, which has long included strong welfare and public spending provisions. The statement continues, stating that it is “determined to prove the burning desire of a small nation for independence and a culture of its own.”

Fellow Sakset seis cofounder and stage director Erik Söderblom published a statement on the campaign’s Facebook page in late November that argued that the proposed cuts are a Pan-European right-populist policy: “One trait unites these parties that is particularly relevant here: in all countries where they wield influence — nearly all of Europe at this point — they demand cuts to cultural budgets.”

Seen in this way, Sakset seis’s invocation of “independence” appears as a rebalancing of a public debate across the West that portrays an international neoliberalizing tendency as ostensibly commonsense bookkeeping. We are told we need cuts to rebalance precarious national finances. Yet too often, the moralistic argument that we should “reduce spending to pay off our debts, like good citizens do” leaves citizens poorer and the public debt higher.

Indeed, it could be argued that far from protecting the Finnish way of life with its nationalistic, anti-immigration rhetoric, Orpo’s government has actually capitulated to international neoliberalism. Telling in this sense is the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) “Concluding Statement on the Finnish Economy” this November, warning of a decline in Finland’s economic growth by 0.2 percent, compared to EU-average growth of 1.1 percent. The IMF praised the Finnish government’s austerity measures, stating that Finland should impose further fiscal belt-tightening through 2026 and beyond. Finns Party leader Purra, who is also finance minister, has been quick to seize on the report’s findings, stating a preparedness for further measures if necessary.

This does not bode well for those who oppose cuts to public spending in Finland. After all, the IMF could eventually cut Finland’s credit rating if it refused to follow its recommendations. Such realpolitik poses tough questions, even for left-wing and opposition parties. However, it could also be pointed out how much austerity has failed elsewhere, and that the IMF-mandated cuts are not a panacea to cure all economic ills. Far from it: Sakset seis’s website bears a statement pointing out the counterproductive effect austerity may have on Finland’s economy and well-being: “The mindless cuts will not result in savings; rather, they will mean greater unemployment and will prevent countless Finns from having access to culture and enjoying and benefitting from its riches.”

Indeed, the IMF’s above-mentioned report encourages measures to “raise labor force participation,” something that will be surely hampered by cultural cuts that will leave contracted workers unemployed and freelancers with less work and income.

Aside from the counterproductive economic effects of cuts to the arts, Sakset seis also points out another contradiction in this plan. For a debate has long raged in Finland about protecting the nation’s languages (Finnish and Swedish) against the influx of English use. As Kosonen said to me: “Language needs art to survive and develop.” As such, this is not a movement about so-called high art forms, but about the ability of a young nation to assert its values both at home and abroad in times of adversity.

Initial cuts are to be felt in theater and the performing arts, which are often seen as middle-class pursuits, yet ones that link closely to television and pop music, two areas where Finland punches above its weight in terms of soft-power exports. As Tommi Korpela, a leading actor in Nordic noir TV series Deadwind (produced by Finnish broadcaster Yle and streaming on Netflix), argued in an article on Yle.fi: “This is going to be a long-lasting destruction . . . and it will be felt in the cultural offerings and lives of all of us.”

The notion that austerity isn’t the answer has been a hard sell for the Left across the West in recent years. Right-wingers have often masqueraded as offering solutions to wealth inequality, promising some incentives for the poor (tax cuts, support for homegrown industry) while actually exacerbating problems where they gain power through austerity measures. Frustratingly, the Left perennially seems unable to convince the voter that it is the party of working-class interests, a situation witnessed for example in Britain since Margaret Thatcher — and now in Finland.

Sakset seis’s aim at a broad appeal across the political spectrum is a bold attempt at addressing this problem, which may just succeed in igniting the public imagination. It seeks to balance patriotism with an appeal to culture’s role in bringing diverse groups of people together. Such a mass-appeal movement is, for now, as good as any solution we can muster across the West as the Left struggles to attract support. We should all watch events in Finland and take note.