The Finnish contagion

Europe used to nod off when Finland voted: in Soviet times it was because the USSR was the "owner" of Helsinki's foreign policy; more recently, it has been because the Finns always voted for colorless, innocuous coalitions. But this has come to an end, and on Monday the elections in a country of five million people had an immediate adverse influence on the Spanish stock market, and raised our debt risk premium (the surcharge to finance the public debt). These are some of the consequences of globalization, and of the thwarted construction of a united Europe.

The True Finns party burgeoned from five to 39 parliamentary seats ? out of 200 ? putting it in the same league as the Conservatives and Social Democrats, with 44 and 40, respectively. Yet this party is more furiously anti-European than any of its like-minded sister parties in the EU, and its program not only abhors immigrants ? who in Finland constitute only a tiny sliver of the population pie ? but is opposed to the financial bailout of Portugal.

Given that Finnish parliament has to approve any contribution made to such an operation, the problem is not that it is going to be difficult to form a government, but that this government, with or without the True Finns, will in some measure be held hostage by that party. And though we now hear of renegotiating the bailout instead of vetoing it, it remains to be seen to what extent such renegotiation may be desirable to Lisbon, and much less to the country's parliament, which caused the Socialist government to fall by rejecting a set of austerity measures aimed at making the bailout operation unnecessary.

And it is the Spanish economy's relative similarity to that of the endangered countries that arouses fears in EU circles that the economic SOS ought to be extended to our country, exploding like a fragmentation bomb in Spain's international credit.

But the rise of the True Finns ? so true as to boast a Catholic leader in a 98-percent Lutheran country ? highlights something rather worse. Immigration causes widespread apprehension in an aging Europe, and on Monday a survey put Marine Le Pen's National Front in first place in the French presidential elections ? 23 percent ? above the Socialist Martine Aubry and the center-right party of President Nicolas Sarkozy, both with 21 percent.

France is now hindering the entry of refugees from the revolts in North Africa, apparently in hopes of appeasing a xenophobic party; Ireland is wondering whether it did well in joining the EU; Greece is now paying for years of fiddling its accounts; and Portugal and Spain are looking at bleak financial prospects, the result of not implementing reforms in time. The case of Finland is, then, more than just a warning.