The population of Finland in 2017 was 5,517,919 people, with the majority living in urban areas. The economy of Finland is largely based on services, with a GDP of $258 billion and a relatively high per capita income. Finland is a member of the United Nations, European Union (EU), International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. It has close ties to many countries throughout Europe as well as Russia and other former Soviet countries. In terms of politics, it is a unitary parliamentary republic with President Sauli Niinistö as its head of state. The Prime Minister is Juha Sipilä who leads the Centre Party which has been in power since 2017. See militarynous for Finland military and defense.
Yearbook 2017
Finland. According to Countryaah.com, Prime Minister Juha Sipilä was indicted at the beginning of the year for a conflict of interest since he led a business delegation during an official visit to India, including a company owned by his children. In addition, it was reported that the company in question was rescued from bankruptcy when the state-owned Fortum’s energy company invested over EUR 6 million in the company when Sipilä was responsible for the state companies.
Public service company Yle’s editor-in-chief was forced to resign in the spring accused of remission of political pressure from the prime minister. Sipilä was reported in several e-mails to the editor-in-chief to have tried to stop Yle’s review of the steel company Katera Steel, owned by Sipilä’s relatives. Among other things, the deal had led journalists at Yle to stop protesting. See ABBREVIATIONFINDER for frequently used acronyms and abbreviations related to as well as country profile of Finland.
In the municipal elections in April, the Assembly Party was the largest, followed by the Social Democrats and the Center Party. The Greens progressed strongly and became the fourth largest party in the country, thus passing on the True Finns, who lost the most mandate of all parties in the municipalities.
The true Finns, who had sharply declining opinion figures, changed party leaders in June. Foreign Minister Timo Soini resigned after two decades at the post of party leader and was succeeded by the disputed EU parliamentarian Jussi Halla-aho. This man was previously convicted of hatred against the ethnic group after blaming Islam on the internet. His political goal was to strengthen the immigration-critical and EU-skeptical profile of the true Finns.
The prime minister and center leader Juha Sipilä highlighted the distance to the new Finns’ new leaders. Both the Center and the Collective Party declared that they could not continue to rule with the True Finns if Halla-aho was leader. The Social Democrats in opposition demanded new elections.
Prime Minister Sipilä was about to resign and dissolve the government when Timo Soini’s Falang in the South Finns broke with the new party leader and formed a new group in the parliament, New Alternative. It comprised 20 of the 37 Finnish members of the true Finns. Thus, Prime Minister Sipilä was able to present a new government with the Center, the Socialist Party and New Alternative instead of the True Finns. New Alternative was later transformed into a party under the name Blue Future.
In August, Finland was struck by what the police described as a terrorist act when a knife-armed young man attacked several people at the Market Square in Turku. Two women were killed and six women and two men injured. According to police, the perpetrator had deliberately attacked women, while the injured men tried to protect and help the victims.
The suspected perpetrator was shot by police who could arrest him. He later admitted in police interrogation that he performed the deed but denied it was a terrorist act.
The labor movement in the 1960’s
The SDP cooperated with the right-wing forces up to the 1961 presidential election, trying to clear the Kekkonen. The attempt failed and, in the context of the Berlin crisis, led to new problems in relations with the Soviet Union. The parliamentary elections held immediately after the so-called note crisis were a major defeat for the SDP. The DFFF constituted by far the largest left-wing group in parliament. The SDP had also “lost” the JRC and most major labor organizations to the breakaway party ASSF (Arbetarnas och Småbrukarnas Socialdemokratiska Förbund). All this led to the SDP, from the 1963 party congress, clearer and clearer away from its old tactics – both in terms of domestic and foreign policy.
The 1961 parliamentary elections had shown that the Social Democratic voters did not trust the ASSF, and the party had low voter turnout. Its fate was locked in because it participated in the civil governments for the first half of the decade. This was a consequence of the labor buyers’ attempt to bind the JRC, which had the ASSF as its “political representative”. The competing national organization (LO) formed by the SDP tried to exploit this situation, but could only gather a small part of the trade unions. The SDP’s new leadership eventually abandoned LO, and the divide in the trade union movement was actually reduced in 1966 when the SDP and FKP entered into an agreement to share power in the JRC. Thus, the door was opened for the trade union movement to become a unity organization, which actually happened in the late 60’s. In the early 1970’s
The agreement between the SDP and the FKP on the JRC undermined the position of the ASSF. The Communists gave up the attempt to exploit the social-democratic divide. In fact, it was only now that the stalinisation broke through in FKP. The right-wing tendencies in Finnish politics had prevented it from happening after the 1956 general strike, a strike that had not given the party great opportunities to play. FKP’s new tactics were clearly expressed by the fact that it joined the government in 1966 and by the party supporting the revenue policy outposts at the end of the decade.
Communist entry into the government was a clear sign that the anti-communist legacy of white Finland had finally collapsed. The turning point was the defeat of Kekkonen’s opponents in the 1962 presidential election. It ended the controversy over the content of foreign policy, which had in fact influenced political life throughout the post-war period. The Paasikivi line was clear. The SDP’s reorientation was based on this realization; It came from the dead end that the ideas of 1948 had brought the party into. Also, the special position of the Agrarian Confederation among the bourgeois parties in the foreign policy field began to fade, while their social policy – also a legacy of white Finland – came into crisis.