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Finland The Swedish People's Party
The abolition of the four-estate Diet and the
introduction of
universal suffrage in 1906 made it clear to the
Swedish-speaking
elite that its traditional domination of Finnish politics
was at
an end. The only chance to protect the rights of
Swedish-speaking
Finns was seen to lie in the formation of a party with a
broader
base that would unite all classes of the minority. For
this
reason the Swedish People's Party (Svenska
Folkpartiet--SFP) was
created in 1906. Composed of members from all classes, the
party
passed over economic questions to concentrate on
preserving the
existence of Swedish-speaking Finns as a cultural group.
Desires for local autonomy in the southern and western
coastal areas, where Swedish Finns had lived for centuries
and
from which the party still drew its support in the late
1980s,
were not met by the Constitution Act of 1919
(see
fig. 12). The
Swedish language was guaranteed the status of an official
language, however, and it was given special protection in
those
areas in which it traditionally had been spoken. During
the
interwar decades when Swedish-speaking Finns were under
serious
pressure from the Agrarian Party and the National
Coalition
Party, the SFP allied itself with the SDP to protect
minority
rights, for though conservative in economic matters, the
SFP was
liberal on social questions. SDP compromises with the
Agrarians
in order to come to power in the Red-Earth governments of
1937
brought the Swedish minority some reverses, but the
Finnicization
program was not fully realized.
After the war, the language question was considered to
be
settled in a way generally satisfactory to most
Swedish-speaking
Finns. The SFP saw to it that the settlement of 400,000
refugees
from Karelia did not upset the existing language balance
in the
areas where Swedish-speaking Finns made up a significant
segment
of the population. Relations between the SFP and the ML
remained
strained, however, because of the Agrarians' role in
attempts at
Finnicization.
The steady decline in the number of Swedish-speaking
Finns
was reflected in the size of the party's delegation in the
Eduskunta. The Finnish electoral system favored parties
with
strongly localized support, however, and its position in
the
center of the political spectrum has meant that the SFP
has been
in most cabinets formed since the war. The virtual
collapse of
the Liberal People's Party (Liberaalinen
Kansanpuolue--LKP) in
the latter half of the 1970s brought the SFP some new
votes, and
in the 1983 and the 1987 elections, the party increased
the
number of its seats in the Eduskunta. Like the larger
parties,
the SFP has been affected by the general drift toward the
center,
and some of its right-wing members have left it for
parties such
as the POP.
Data as of December 1988
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