Political history of Finland
Under the 1634 Swedish-Finnish form of government and the first parliamentary order, Finland's four estates, the nobility, the clergy, the bourgeoisie and the peasants, sent their representatives to the Riksdag in Stockholm.
[1] After the weakening of the Swedish Empire, it was no longer in a position to maintain its conquests of the Baltic Sea environment and had to cede the eastern parts to Russia as a result of wars.
The Finnish central government also adopted the methods of the Russian bureaucracy fluently and generally did not take a very positive view of the reforms.
[4] During the Russian rule, political activism gradually grew demanding more autonomy and eventually independence for Finland.
As the century drew to a close and the Fennoman movement had achieved its principal goals, economic issues and relations with the tsarist empire came to dominate politics.
Because the existing political groups did not adequately represent labor's interests, a workers' party was formed at the end of the century.
The Swedish People's Party (Svenska Folkpartiet or SFP), also dating from this period, was formed to serve the entire Swedish-speaking population.
The nervousness of tsarist officials about Finnish loyalty in wartime prompted measures to bind Finland more closely to the empire.
In retrospect, the campaign can be seen as a failure, but for several decades it caused much turmoil within Finland, reaching its most extreme point with the assassination of the governor general in 1904.
The first Russian revolution, that of 1905, allowed Finns to discard their antiquated Diet and to replace it with a unicameral legislature, the Eduskunta, elected through universal suffrage.
With these reforms, Russia got a cabinet headed by the Prime Minister, through which all matters concerning Finland that went to the emperor passed through.
The Council of People's Commissars of Soviet Russia, chaired by Lenin, recognized Finland's independence on December 31, 1917, and soon after that many other states followed.
Within weeks, domestic political differences led to a Finnish Civil War that lasted until May 1918, when right-wing forces, with some German assistance, were able to claim victory.
As a consequence, Finland began its existence as an independent state with a considerable segment of its people estranged from the holders of power, a circumstance that caused much strife in Finnish politics.
In mid-1919, Finns agreed on a new Constitution, one that constructed a modern parliamentary system of government from existing political institutions and traditions.
Communist organizations were banned, and their representatives in the Eduskunta arrested, but the SDP was able to recover from wounds sustained during the Civil War and was returned to power.
[8] Finland's official foreign policy of neutrality in the interwar period could not offset the strategic importance of the country's territory to Nazi Germany and to the Soviet Union.
Nevertheless, Finland succeeded in being one of only two belligerents in Europe that stayed never occupied, independent and with its democracy intact throughout the war, the other being the United Kingdom.
In 1966 it changed its name to the Center Party (Keskustapuolue or Keskusta) in an attempt to appeal to a broader segment of the electorate, but it still was not successful in penetrating southern coastal Finland.
The SFP, a moderate centrist party with liberal and conservative wings, had a slightly declining number of seats in the parliament Eduskunta, but its position in the middle of the political spectrum often made it indispensable for coalition governments.
By the late 1980s, it seemed a spent force, but arose again as a populist right-wing party after changing its name to Perussuomalaiset or True Finns.
[9] After the 1966 national elections President Kekkonen succeeded in forming a popular front coalition government that contained communists, socialists, and members of the Center Party.
Although the larger parties differed on specific issues, and personal rivalries could be poisonous, there was broad agreement about domestic and foreign policy.
The cabinet put in place after the 1983 elections, consisting mainly of social democrats and members of the Center Party, completed its whole term of office, the first government to do so in the postwar period.
[9] A foundation of the politics of consensus was the success of the system of broad incomes agreements that has characterized Finland's employee-employer relations in recent decades.
The process was successful at increasing labor peace in a country that had been racked by strikes for the first decades after World War II.
Finland's partnership with NATO was historically based on its policy of military non-alignment, which changed following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
