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Finland

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The Finnish Party (in Finnish: Suomalainen Puolue) was a Fennoman conservative political party in the autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland and independent Finland. Born out of Finland's language strife in the 1860s, the party sought to improve the position of the Finnish language in Finnish society. Johan Vilhelm Snellman was its ideological leader to his death, after which Johan Richard Danielsson-Kalmari and Yrjö Sakari Yrjö-Koskinen played leading roles. The party's chief organ was the Suometar newspaper, later Uusi-Suometar, and its members were sometimes called Suometarians (suomettarelaiset).

[edit] History

In the 1880s a faction called the Young Finland group rose within the party and in 1894 it founded the Young Finnish Party. The Young Finns advocated passive resistance against Russification whereas the majority of the Finnish Party, the so-called Old Finns, wanted to make concessions. The party emphasized the importance of protecting the position of the Finnish language and keeping official positions in Finnish hands, and feared that resistance could lead to the loss of autonomy.

Aside from the central language question, the party espoused conservative values and supported many social reforms, especially after the 1906 election reform. In parliamentary elections in 1907-1917, the party was consistently the biggest non-socialist party in the Parliament and the second biggest overall after the Social Democratic Party. However, it lost seats in every election, sliding down from 59 MPs in 1907 to 32 in 1917.

 YEAR    SEATS VOTE%    RANK
 1907    59    27.34    2nd
 1908    55    25.44    2nd
 1909    48    23.62    2nd
 1910    42    22.07    2nd
 1911    43    21.71    2nd
 1913    38    19.88    2nd
 1916    33    17.49    2nd
 1917    32    ?        2nd

By the end of the Finnish Civil War, Russification was no longer an issue and the language question had losta great deal of its importance in Finnish politics. The main issues holding the party together were now secondary to economic issues and the question of Finland's form of government. In 1918 the party's supporters divided into two new parties, a majority going to the conservative, monarchist National Coalition Party and a minority to the liberal, republican National Progressive Party.

[edit] Prominent party members

• Johan Vilhelm Snellman (1806-1881)
• Agathon Meurman (1826-1909)
• Yrjö Sakari Yrjö-Koskinen (1830-1903)
• Johan Richard Danielsson-Kalmari (1853-1933)
• Kaarlo Castrén (1860-1938)
• Lauri Ingman (1863-1934)
• Juho Kusti Paasikivi (1870-1956) - Senate chairman 1918
• Ernst Nevanlinna (1873-1932) - Speaker of Parliament 1918, editor of Uusi Suometar 1906-1913

TODO: better account of the ideology, positions on the big issues during 1905-1907 and 1917-1918, Danielsson-Kalmari and Yrjö Sakari Yrjö-Koskinen, maybe Paasikivi, maybe examples from the 1906 reform program [1]

--Jouten 10:58, 29 March 2007 (UTC)