Finnish Elections Graphic since 1919

5 comments

1. Hitler-jugend visiting IKL youth in 1934. Now we have Sinimusta Liike that fashions themselves from the 1930’s fascist movement, running for parliament.
   Democracy against democracy 

   https://preview.redd.it/fwv29cwk56ra1.png?width=992&format=png&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=7358bab84ce4e376d0eff3cd9d2591cf213ab2b2

2. I’m surprised by the high support for SDP just after they had tried to take control of the government by war and violence. It really was a miracle that Finland could defend against soviets just 20 year later.

   Someone should make a graph showing how many european counties have currently sitting PM/president from a party that has attempted coup by civil war.

3. For foreign observers, the big upset in recent history was the right-wing populist Finns party (Perussuomalaiset) going from 5 seats to 39 in 2011. They got 38 in 2015 and 39 again in 2019, despite their parliamentary group splitting in two in 2017 when Jussi Halla-aho became party leader. The splinter group (Siniset), which had got half of the MPs and all of Finns ministers in the split, was wiped out completely in the 2019 elections.

   The predecessor party SMP pulled a similar upset in 1970, going from one seat to 18. The party’s platform was economic populism aimed at low-income farmers etc., a more populist version of the Center party. The party gradually dwindled in the 1990s, being reduced to one representative in 1995 and then going bankrupt in 1996, I believe. Timo Soini founded the Finns party on the ruins of SMP, with a similar economic populist ‘for the small people’ platform. Immigration was not a major theme at the time. The party had one MP in 1999, Raimo Vistbacka. Soini himself became an MP in 2003, and eventually the Minister of Foreign Affairs in 2015.

   The Green League appears in 1983 for the first time. They weren’t formally organized as a party yet, but had two nominally independent MPs. The movement was debating whether to form a political party at all, or try to implement an environmental program within existing parties instead, particulartly the SDP. By the 1987 elections, they had their own party. The current foreign minister Pekka Haavisto was elected for the first time then. He was not elected in 1995, but he got appointed as Minister of the Environment anyway, as the second green party minister in the world. The party got a record number of seats, 20, in 2019, but they are headed for a significant loss now.

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5. The first parliamentary elections were in 1907, when the Social Democrats won the elections, 181 male members and 19 female members were elected to parliament because there weren’t many female candidates at that time. However, the government lasted one year, after which it was dissolved by Tsar Nicholas II (who wanted a bourgeois government in Finland) as too left-wing and the failure to improve the living conditions of the poor in autonomous Finland. New elections were held in Finland in 1908 and this time it was won by the Social Democrats, agen, and ended up being dissolved for the same reasons in 1909. The Social Democrats also won the 1909 election, the 1910 election, the 1911 election, the 1913 election, the 1916 election, the 1917 election and the 1919 election.

   In addition, the beginning of the history of Finland’s independence is also connected to a side path that is less talked about. Finland became independent in 1917 as a republic by taking advantage of the gap created by october unrest, for a short time (about two months) it was also a kingdom (supported by the monarchists who won the Finnish civil war against the Finnish Socialist Workers’ Republic) in 1918, but after the German prince Frederick Charles of Hesse was abdicated the offered crown of Finland, Finland ended up back as a parliamentary republic in 1919, which was established and cemented in the 1919 constitution.