A sign of how we misunderstand freedom of speech, how things are going wrong in Europe lately and how elements of the state can actually – and for me intentionally – help misleadingly to provocatively insult democracy, is what happened in Finland this week.

On Monday August 10th, a provocative banner appeared on the road between Ylöjärvi and Nokia. A banner that called the people on other side of the Mediterranean, the refugees who try to escape war, death and hunger as “animals”. There is absolutely no political correct way to put it; this is a racist comment, intentionally racist and insulting to every single democrat and thinking human in this world.

However and despite calls from the public it took three days for the police to decide if it was …racist or not. Three days after and with the banner making headlines in mainstream and social media, the police felt obliged to act and removed the banner. In the meantime a Nazi group – Nazi and not neo-Nazi because there is absolutely nothing “neo” about them – under the name “Finnish Resistance Movement”, known for hate crimes and a violent demonstration they organized a few days before, claimed responsibility for the banner.

On Friday a police inspector, representing the Finnish police, announced that the banner is under investigation because it was set up …without permission on land owned by the City of Tampere and without the knowledge of city officials. Adding that if they find out that no crime was committed then the police will have to …return the banner to the site where it was found.

I suppose if I rent a space from one of the owners of the buildings around the Senate Square, the most visited and central place in Helsinki, and rise a banner saying “Cops are pigs” then …following the same way of thinking, nothing will happen to me. You never know, cops might even help me put the banner.

Leaving aside that most of the police, unfortunately in every country, is infiltrated by nationalists, bad trained – to none at all - in social and sensitive issues, chosen in a discriminating way for what they don’t believe and not in what they believe - ironically been an anti-Communist or anti-liberal is a principal and without any prior knowledge or investigation if they are racist or they have shown prejudice; these people are the less competent to take any decision like this.

This is a decision only the public prosecutor can take and then order the police to act. A public prosecutor has the right to investigate if this sign violates the laws and the constitution of the country and a public prosecutor is obliged to investigate something that provokes the society and the international laws Finland has signed. But the prosecutor was absent from the beginning all the way to the end.

Then again if a prosecutor investigates if a banner which calls refugees animals violates the constitution and the laws – which it does – then they also have to investigate why a party which actually rules in partnership with the conservative and center parties the country, goes with a name like Perussuomalaiset. Is exactly the same case. A name which they want to accept it or not, translates into the True/Pure Finns and they like it or not veils a racist message. Just like the banner. But they would never do that, would they? That demands first of all democratic understanding and has nothing to do with freedom of speech. But this is something they don’t get either.

So the truth is that they are doing absolutely nothing because they don’t want to open a can of worms that might turn against them in the end. Against Finland’s second party, partner in the government and the foreign minister himself. You see somehow elements of the state intentionally or not, protect the serpent's egg. Because “Finnish Resistance Movement” has always bee the guerrilla part of the True/Pure Finns, MPs of the True/Pure Finns enjoy participating in their events and share photographs with them in social media and most importantly they embrace the same hate idea as often member and MPs from the True/Pure Finns have proven.

Five years ago people like me kept warning that the problem in Finland is not the laws or the constitution, the problem in Finland is with the people who apply the laws and the constitution or better don’t apply them. Now Finland is governed by the people who by definition are against democracy, the laws and the constitution. What happened this week in Finland with the banner, is just one of the many signs lately that the serpent's egg has hatched.