Controversial ex-MP Ano Turtiainen faces ethnic agitation charges

Finland’s Prosecutor General has filed three charges of ethnic agitation against former MP Ano Turtiainen (VKK).

All three charges relate to posts Turtiainen wrote on Twitter while he was a Finns Party MP.

Turtiainen posted a tweet mocking George Floyd, shortly after Floyd was choked to death by a police officer in the US city of Minneapolis in 2020.

The second charge also relates to a tweet from 2020, in which Turtiainen used a derogatory term to refer to dark-skinned or foreign background taxi drivers.

The fallout from the controversial tweets led to Turtiainen being expelled from the Finns Party in February 2021. He then set up his own, one-man parliamentary group and party called Power Belongs to the People (VKK in Finnish).

Turtiainen stood for VKK in the parliamentary election in spring 2023, but he did not garner enough votes to retain his seat in parliament.

Police also investigated a Facebook post Turtiainen wrote during the Covid pandemic, in which he said he considers the Finnish police to be like an ‘enemy during war’ after officers broke up a protest against coronavirus restrictions.

This file was not passed to prosecutors however as police said it did not meet the threshold to be considered an incitement against an official.

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