‘Bigwig hatred’ and the emergence of the first Scandinavian agrarian-populist party

Abstract

<p>In the genealogy of the Scandinavian populist-party family, agrarian populism has been largely neglected and, when discussed at all, it is traced back to Finland in the late 1950s. This paper argues: (i) that agrarian populism long predated the 1950s and that it was politically salient from the decade before Finnish independence in 1917; (ii) that it is useful to distinguish between an agrarian-class and agrarian-populist party type; (iii) that in wider comparative perspective, first-wave Finnish agrarian populism was distinctive; and iv) that during the critical party-building phase, the Finnish Agrarian Party (AP) is best characterised a populist party embodying a diffuse small-farmer antipathy towards socially superior urban elites. The AP did not create this ‘bigwig hatred’ (herraviha), but in perpetuating it and ‘othering it’ within a binary ‘us-and-them’ paradigm, it became the first populist party in both Finland and Scandinavia.</p>