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

Abstract

AbstractIn 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.