Remarks by Estonia’s interior minister towards Finland’s new millennial, female-led government have provoked a leftist backlash, including a confidence vote in the Estonian parliament.
Interior Minister Mart Helme labelled Finland’s Prime Minister Sanna Marin and her new cabinet as non-educated “street activists” and called Prime Minister Marin a “sales girl”, provoking a wave of left-liberal condemnation, the BBC reports.
“Now we see how one sales girl has become a prime minister and how some other street activists and non-educated people have also joined the cabinet,” Helme, the leader of the populist Conservative People’s Party of Estonia (EKRE), said.
The 70-year-old apologised for his remarks on Monday after Estonian president Kersti Kaljulaid contacted Finland’s president Sauli Niinisto offering an apology.
The comments also sparked a motion of confidence against the interior minister, but despite the parliament voting 44 to 42 to remove him from his post the move failed due to a requirement for at least 51 votes to pass the motion.
While he did apologise, Helme also claimed that the media had overblown his comments.
He has previously described Estonia’s female president as “an emotionally heated woman”.
Finland’s new Social Democrat prime minister is the youngest in the country’s history and many expect her to take the nation further to the left than her predecessor.
Alongside Marin, the leaders of all but one of her coalition party partners are also millennial generation women, many championing progressive and leftist policies such as the decriminalisation of all drugs, in the case of Interior Minister Maria Ohisalo.
Minister of Education Le Andersson is also a self-professed Marxist who has said she “understood” the illegal tactics used by animal rights activists against fur farms.
Before Marin and her cabinet can set to work on their policies, they faced a confidence motion on Tuesday which they passed by a vote of 105 to 80.
They faced another confidence motion on Wednesday over the handling of Finnish citizens who joined the Islamic State and are now held in a prison camp in Syria.