Social Democratic Party of Finland
핀란드 사회민주당
A Finnish social democratic party founded in Turku in 1899 as the Workers' Party of Finland and renamed in 1903. It won a parliamentary majority in the 1916 election, and many of its members fought on the Red side in the Finnish Civil War of 1918. After the war it was rebuilt as a reformist party under Väinö Tanner, and it is Finland’s oldest active party.
In depth
The party was founded in 1899 as the Workers' Party of Finland, holding its first congress in Turku on 17–20 July. At its second congress in Forssa in 1903 it took the name Social Democratic Party of Finland, ignoring a ban by Governor-General Nikolay Bobrikov, and adopted the Forssa Programme, modelled on the German Social Democrats’ Erfurt Programme of 1891. The programme demanded an eight-hour day, a minimum wage, compulsory education and prohibition, and remained the official platform until 1952. When the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the general strike brought universal and equal suffrage in 1906, the party grew into a mass party.
In the 1916 election the party won 103 of the 200 seats, a majority, and a socialist-majority Senate headed by Oskari Tokoi was formed. When parliament passed the Power Act in summer 1917 declaring itself the holder of supreme power, the Russian Provisional Government dissolved it, and the party lost its majority in the ensuing election. According to the Finnish source, on 23 January 1918 the party council yielded to the Red Guards’ demand to add far-left members, including Otto Wille Kuusinen, Kullervo Manner and Edvard Gylling, to the party committee, whose executive committee prepared an armed revolution. On 28 January the Red Guards seized power in southern Finland, and party members took part in the Red government, the People's Delegation of Finland.
After the White Guard’s victory most party leaders were killed, imprisoned or fled to Soviet Russia. The exiles founded the Communist Party of Finland in Moscow in 1918 (in August, according to the Finnish source). Tanner and other leaders who had stayed out of the Red uprising rebuilt the party in autumn 1918 on a reformist line rejecting revolution, and it won 80 seats in the 1919 election. In 1937 it entered a coalition government with the Agrarian League, and during the Second World War it was central to broad coalition cabinets.
After the war, from 1944 to 1949, the party competed with the communists for voters and for control of the trade unions; its anti-communism drew Soviet criticism, and it could return to government only in 1966. According to the English source, the US Central Intelligence Agency funded the party through Nordic sister parties and other channels. Since then the party has taken part in most Finnish cabinets, and Paavo Lipponen (1995–2003) and Antti Rinne and Sanna Marin (2019) served as prime ministers.