Finland The Social Democratic Party
Unavailable
Kalevi Sorsa, a leading Social Democrat and
former prime minister and minister of foreign affair
Courtesy Embassy of Finland, Washington
Paavo Väyrynen, a prominent member of the Center Party and a former
minister of foreign affairs
Courtesy Embassy of Finland, Washington
Harri Holkeri, leader of
the National Coalition Party and prime minister, 1987-
Courtesy Embassy of Finland, Washington
Founded in 1899 as the Finnish Labor Party, the Finnish
Social Democratic Party (Suomen Sosialide Mokrorrinwn
Puolue--
SDP) took its present name in 1903 and adopted a program
that
envisioned the gradual realization of a socialist society,
not by
revolution but through parliamentary democracy. In the
1907
parliamentary election, the SDP won eighty seats, easily
surpassing the results of its closest rival, the Old Finn
Party.
Then, in 1916, the last time any Finnish party has done
so, the
SDP won slightly more than an absolute majority.
Seduced by the example of the Bolshevik Revolution in
nearby
Petrograd, many Social Democrats sought in early 1918 to
realize
long-term party goals quickly and by force
(see The Finnish Civil War
, ch. 1). After the defeat of the left in the civil war
and
the departure of radical elements from its ranks, however,
the
SDP was reconstituted in the same year under the
leadership of
the moderate Vainö Tanner, an opponent of the use of
violence for
political ends. Although still the country's largest
political
party, the SDP was in only one government--a short-lived
minority
government formed by Tanner in 1926--until 1937. At that
time, it
joined the Agrarian Party (Maalaisliitto--ML in forming
the first
of the so-called Red-Earth governments, the most common
and
important coalition pattern for the next fifty years. A
tempering
of SDP policy on the place of the small farmer in Finnish
society
permitted political cooperation with the Agrarians,
although the
party retained its program of a planned economy and the
socialization of the means of production.
It was in 1937 that the SDP first began to demand the
right
to collective bargaining, and the party remained closely
connected to organized labor. In 1930, for example, it had
formed
the Confederation of Finnish Trade Unions (Suomen
Ammattiyhdistysten Keskusliitto--SAK) in an attempt to
counter
communist influence in the labor movement. During World
War II,
the SDP contributed significantly to national unity, and
it
resisted both rightist dreams of a Greater Finland and the
desires of others for an early truce with the Soviet
Union.
After the war, long-standing tensions within the party
caused
factional disputes, between those advocating closer
relations
with both the Soviets and the newly legalized Communist
Party of
Finland (Suomen Kommunistinen Puolue--SKP) and those
critical of
the Soviet Union and its undemocratic methods. Some SDP
members
left it for the newly formed popular front organization,
the
Finnish People's Democratic League (Suomen Kansan
Demokraattinen
Liitto--SKDL), which participated in the broad popular
front
government formed after the 1945 elections. After the
defeat of
the communists in the 1948 elections, the SDP held all
cabinet
posts in the minority government of 1948-1950; however,
thereafter the party participated in cabinets on an
irregular
basis, and it was riven by internal struggles until the
1960s.
During the 1950s and early 1960s, the SDP as a whole
became
increasingly moderate. An early indication of this move
toward
moderation was the party program adopted in 1952 that
played down
the role of class conflict and was critical of communism.
Still,
bitter internal wrangles continued to plague the party
into the
1960s. The conflicts had both political and personal
origins, but
their core was disagreement about the SDP's policy toward
the
Soviet Union. Tanner's implacable hostility to the
undemocratic
nature of Soviet society had led Moscow to insist on his
imprisonment as a "war criminal" after the war. His
reinstatement
as party leader in 1957 has generally been regarded as a
factor
in the Night Frost Crisis of 1958 and in the SDP's
subsequent
exclusion from power until 1966
(see Domestic Developments and Foreign Politics, 1948-66
, ch. 1).
Conflicts relating to domestic politics resulted in the
departure in 1959 of members close to farming interests.
They
formed the Social Democratic Union of Workers and Small
Farmers
(Työvaen ja Pienviljelijain Sosialidemokraattinen
Liitto--TPSL),
a splinter group that contested elections and was included
in
several governments until the 1970s, when it expired and
most of
its remaining members returned to the SDP.
The election of Rafael Paasio to the party chairmanship
in
1963 ended the reign of the old leadership and brought a
gradual
improvement in SDP relations with the Soviet Union;
another
result was a gradual healing of rifts within the labor
movement.
These changes, coupled with the election returns of 1966
that led
to the first socialist majority in the Eduskunta since
1945,
allowed the party to leave the political wilderness to
which it
had been consigned after the Note Crisis of 1961 (see
table 5,
Appendix A). It participated in a strong majority
government
together with the newly renamed Center Party (formerly the
Agrarian Party), the SKDL, and the TPSL. The popular front
government passed a good part of the legislation that
transformed
Finland into a modern welfare state of the Scandinavian
type and
helped to establish the system of collective wage
agreements that
still prevailed in the late 1980s.
During the 1970s, the SDP moved closer to the center in
Finnish politics as a result of the departure of some of
the
party's members for groups farther to the left and the
cautious
pragmatic leadership of Kalevi Sorsa, who became party
chairman
in 1975. Sorsa, who held this position until 1987, served
from
the mid-1970s until the late 1980s as either prime
minister or
foreign minister in all governments, which helped to
remove any
doubts about the party's suitability for governing.
The SDP's success in the elections for the Eduskunta in
1983,
coming after the triumph of SDP politician Mauno Koivisto
in the
presidential election a year earlier, may have marked a
high
point in the party's history, for in the second half of
the 1980s
the SDP had trouble attracting new voters from
postindustrial
Finland's growing service sector. The SDP's years as a
governing
party, which had tied it to many pragmatic compromises,
lessened
its appeal for some. At the same time, the number of
blue-collar
workers, its most important source of support, declined.
The
party could be seen as a victim of its own success in that
it had
participated in implementing policies that brought
unprecedented
prosperity to Finland, which served to transform Finnish
society
and dissolve old voting blocs.
The party lost 100,000 votes and the office of prime
minister
in the 1987 parliamentary elections (see
table 6, Appendix
A).
The SDP remained in the government formed by the
conservative
National Coalition Party, however. Observers believed that
the
new party chairman, Pertti Paasio, son of Rafael Paasio,
and
other younger members of the party would have to adapt to
longterm trends in Finnish society that promised to make the
party's
future difficult. Although the SDP registered slight gains
in the
1988 local elections, it still had to contend with the
same
economic and social problems that made the other social
democratic parties of Western Europe seem to many to be
parties
of the past.
Data as of December 1988
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