Nordic cooperation

Finland became a member of the United Nations and of the Nordic Council in 1955. Nordic cooperation has led to many legislative and political similarities between Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. These include free movement across the borders of these five countries, the gradual development of a common and free labour market, and other similar measures in the fields of politics, economics, and culture. In 1986 Finland became a full member of the European Free Trade Association. It left that organization in 1995 when it became a member of the EU. Tensions arose within the country when its Baltic Sea neighbours joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1999 (Poland) and 2004 (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania). Finland initially resisted pressure from the other Nordic countries to join the international ban on antipersonnel land mines but then declared its intention to join by 2012.

Domestic affairs

During the early postwar years, Finland’s domestic affairs were marked by economic difficulties. After World War II the country was left with the task of absorbing about 300,000 refugees from the areas ceded to the Soviet Union and at the same time paying war reparations. Despite these obstacles, Finland quickly recovered. The war reparations brought about rapid expansion in the metal and shipbuilding industries, and the timber trade soon resumed exporting and quickly exceeded its prewar level. The rebuilding and colonization required to resettle the refugees, however, were such a drain on the country’s economic resources that inflation could not be avoided; as a result Finland had to devaluate its currency on a number of occasions.

After the armistice, the new Finnish Communist Party held a strong position, which it retained in the subsequent government. When in the spring of 1948 it was alleged that the party had planned a coup, Parliament forced the Communist minister of the interior to resign. After the parliamentary elections in the autumn of 1948, a Social Democratic government came to power under the leadership of Fagerholm. Governments changed rapidly and consisted of various party coalitions during the 1950s, in most cases under the leadership of the Agrarian Party or the Social Democrats. During this period, however, both the Conservative National Coalition Party and the leftist Finnish People’s Democratic League, which included the Finnish Communist Party, were excluded from the government.

Forming and keeping a government in Finland is very difficult because of the proliferation of political parties; no one party, and often no party group, can command a majority in Parliament. As a consequence, there have been many nonpolitical cabinets composed of civil servants appointed by the president. With continuing economic growth and because of internal disputes, Communist Party influence diminished after the 1970s, and after the party’s split in the mid-1980s the Communists suffered severe losses in the 1987 election. The Conservatives gained a long-desired victory, and, with a compromise aided by President Koivisto, the Social Democrats and Conservatives, together with some smaller parties, formed a coalition government under Conservative Prime Minister Harri Holkeri. This allowed the Conservatives to return to the cabinet after more than 20 years and forced the Centre Party into opposition for the first time since independence. The Conservative–Social Democratic coalition did not satisfy the traditional constituencies of the two parties, however, and in 1991 the Centre Party reemerged as the largest party.

A new cabinet, formed by major nonsocialist parties and with the Centre’s Esko Aho as prime minister, immediately faced Finland’s worst peacetime economic recession. During the early 1990s production dropped sharply and unemployment skyrocketed, largely because trade with Russia had shrunk to a fraction of the Soviet-era level. There was also a general policy of privatizing state-owned assets throughout the 1990s, which promoted rationalization in many industries. Recovery came slowly, as export markets shifted toward the EU countries. The government also tried to cut expenditures, notably on social programs. The public expressed its displeasure with the slow pace of recovery by again ousting the Centre from the government in the elections of 1995. Social Democrat Paavo Lipponen formed a cabinet from a broad-based coalition that included, for the first time, members of the environmentalist Green Union.

Economic recovery continued into the 21st century, as did the generally positive benefits of EU membership. Unemployment was brought under control, perhaps in part because of the tremendous success of the high-tech industry, notably the manufacturing of mobile telephones. Food prices and interest rates dropped and even agriculture was not as severely affected as some economists had feared.

Finland’s integration into Europe also continued on the political front, as the country assumed the revolving EU presidency at the end of the 1990s. The new constitution, adopted in 2000, reflected both changing concepts of sovereignty in light of Finland’s membership in the EU and the Finns’ cautious approach to internationalization. In 2000 Finland also elected its first female president, Tarja Halonen of the Social Democratic Party. When Anneli Jäätteenmäki, of the Centre Party, was appointed prime minister in April 2003, Finland became the first European country with women as both president and prime minister. However, after Jäätteenmäki was accused of having shared with the press confidential information on Finland’s policy toward Iraq, Matti Vanhanen replaced her as prime minister in June. Vanhanen retained his position when the Centre Party won a narrow victory in the 2007 parliamentary elections. The National Coalition Party finished a close second, while the Social Democrats suffered significant losses.

In 2009 a funding scandal tarnished the reputation and popularity of the Centre Party, and Vanhanen was pressured to step down. After first relinquishing the party leadership, he resigned as prime minister in June 2010 and was replaced by Mari Kiviniemi, who had already succeeded him as Centre Party leader. She became the second woman to hold the post of Finnish prime minister. In parliamentary elections in April 2011 the Centre Party dropped from 51 to 35 seats, tumbling to fourth place and out of the government. Its former coalition partner, the National Coalition Party (NCP), won the election by capturing 44 seats (a drop of six seats from the 2007 election) but faced the prospect of coalition rule with one of the main opposition parties—either the Social Democrats, who finished second with 42 seats, or the anti-immigrant, Euroskeptic True Finn Party, which proved to be the election’s biggest surprise as it vaulted from the five seats it won in the 2007 election to 39 seats and third place in 2011.

At the centre of True Finn policy was strong opposition to the EU’s bailout of countries such as Greece, Ireland, and Portugal, which were hard-hit by the euro-zone debt crisisthat began in 2009. Ultimately, the True Finns chose to remain in opposition. However, the Social Democrats joined what ultimately became the five-party coalition government led by Prime Minister Jyrki Katainen (the head of the NCP) but only on the condition that collateral be introduced as a prerequisite for the Greek bailout. Although Finland negotiated collateral unilaterally with Greece, other EU countries refused to accept the plan, and in September 2011 Finland agreed to join the bailout package. Finland was later granted a collateral plan but only for 20 percent of its share of the bailout (€1.44 billion [about $2 billion]), which the Finns were required to pay in a single installment.

In the first round of voting in January 2012 to replace Halonen (who was constitutionally limited to two terms as president), the True Finn candidate, Timo Soini, and the similarly Euroskeptic Centre Party candidate, Paavo Väyrynen, finished fourth and third, respectively. In the runoff election held in February, the NCP’s pro-EU candidate, Sauli Niinistö, a former finance minister, became the first conservative to serve as Finland’s head of state in decades. He won the office by defeating the country’s first openly gay candidate for the presidency, Pekka Haavisto, of the Green Party. Later in the year Finland agreed to participate in the EU’s bailout of Spain, again on the condition that it receive collateral for its contribution.

In the meantime, Finland’s export-oriented economy had been rocked hard by the first blast of the euro-zone debt crisis, with the national gross domestic product (GDP) shrinking by 8.5 percent in 2009. Although the GDP rebounded to growth in 2010–11, the economy tumbled into recession in 2012–13. In June 2014 Katainen stepped down as NCP leader and prime minister to pursue high-level office in the EU. He was replaced as party leader by the ardently pro-EU Alexander Stubb, the minister for European affairs, who ascended to prime minister on June 24 despite volatility within the governing coalition.

With the economy still in peril and all the major parties calling for some form of austerity, voters in Finland went to the polls in April 2015 to elect a new parliament. The Centre Party, led by Juha Sipilä, fared best, capturing 49 seats, followed by the Finns (the renamed True Finns), who secured 38 seats, the NCP with 37 seats, and the Social Democrats with 34. When negotiations ended in May, Sipilä assumed the post of prime minister, having formed a new right-leaning governing coalition that included the Finns, whose Euroskeptic leader Soini became foreign minister, and the NCP.

On March 22, 2016, Finland’s Ministry of Defense was the target of a “distributed denial of service” (DDoS) cyber attack, which attempted to crash the ministry’s main Web site by overwhelming it with user traffic. The attack lasted about three hours and followed a similar attack in February. It also coincided with a meeting between Finnish Pres. Sauli Niinistö and Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin. There was wide suspicion that the attack was Russian in origin and intended to discourage Finland from pursuing greater military cooperation with NATO. In the wake of Russia’s annexation of the breakaway Ukrainian republic of Crimea in 2014, its continued support of ethnic Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, and aggressive Russian posturing in the Baltic region, Finland not only had expanded cooperation with NATO but was considering applying for full membership in the organization, a potential course of action that polarized opinion in Finland.

Siplä’s government stepped up the austerity policies of its predecessor, and Finland’s economy, which had been in recession for three years began to bounce back, with GDP growing by .5 percent in 2015, 2.8 percent in 2016, and 3.0 percent in 2017. In that last year, Siplä expelled the Finns from the governing coalition after they elected hardline nationalist Jusi Halla-aho as their new leader. Twenty-one moderates then chose to leave the Finns to form a splinter group, New Alternative, and were welcomed back into the governing coalition. In the meantime, with economic growth slowing again, Antti Rinne, the leader of the Social Democrats, intensified his criticism of Siplä’s austerity policies.

When Finland went to the polls in April 2019, Rinne and the Social Democrats finished with 17.7 percent of the vote, edging out the Finns, who took 17.5 percent, and the Centre Party, which won the support of 17 percent of the voters. Promising to raise taxes to preserve the country’s welfare state and to increase public spending, Rinne became prime minister at the head of a five-party coalition that included the Centre Party, as well as the Social Democrats’ more natural allies, the left-leaning Greens, Left Alliance, and Swedish People’s Party. Rinne’s tenure in office was short-lived, however, as he was forced to step down in December after mishandling a pay dispute involving Finland’s postal service. He was replaced by Sanna Marin, the minister of transport and communications, who, at age 34, became the youngest prime minister in Finnish history.

Soon after taking office, Marin was faced with the challenge of responding to the COVID-19 global pandemic, which reached Finland in mid-March 2020. She and the Finnish government acted quickly, instituting strict border controls, closing schools, prescribing social distancing measures, imposing an economic and social lockdown, and introducing testing, tracking, and, later, vaccination protocols. As a result of this aggressive approach, Finland experienced lower infection rates and a quicker economic recovery than many other European countries, and Marin was widely praised for her steady handling of the crisis.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Finland responded dramatically, ending decades of neutrality by joining its close security partner, Sweden, in applying in May for membership in NATO. Accession to membership in NATO required the approval of all 30 of the organization’s member states, which for the most part came quickly, though Turkey and Hungary dragged their heels. Angered by Finland and Sweden’s strident criticism of antidemocratic measures undertaken by its Viktor Orbán-led government, Hungary withheld its approval of Finland’s candidacy until late March 2023. Days later Turkey, which accused Sweden of embracing terrorists through its support of the militant Kurdish nationalist organization, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), followed Hungary’s lead in allowing Finland to join NATO but continued to stand in the way of Swedish membership. Finland officially became NATO’s 31st member on April 4, doubling the extent of the frontier that Russia shared with NATO states as a result of the roughly 800-mile (1,300-km) Russia–Finland border. Because of the close integration of Swedish and Finnish defense forces, Finland’s joining NATO without Sweden brought challenges.

As the April Finnish parliamentary elections approached, Marin remained personally popular with many Finns despite her actions in a pair of controversial incidents. In December 2021 she was criticized for having gone nightclubbing after having been exposed to a cabinet member who had tested positive for COVID-19, and in August 2022 a video came to light that showed her singing, dancing, drinking, and partying with friends and celebrities. Critics branded her behaviour in the video as unworthy of a prime minister, but supporters dismissed the criticism as sexist.

In the meantime, support for the ruling coalition and its policies waned. Shortages that were consequences of the Russia-Ukraine War took a toll on the Finnish economy, and many Finns were disturbed by the rising cost of living. Petteri Orpo, leader of the National Coalition Party (NCP), and Riikka Purra, leader of the ultranationalist Finns accused the Social Democrats of profligate overspending and made Finland’s public debt a central election issue.

When results were in from the parliamentary elections, the Social Democrats had increased their presence in the Eduskunta by three seats, but the five-party ruling coalition headed by Marin came up short. The NCP finished first, taking nearly 21 percent of the vote to gain 10 seats, for a total representation in the Eduskunta of 48 seats. With just over 20 percent of the vote, the Finns finished second, picking up 7 seats, for a total of 46 seats. Having captured nearly 20 percent of the vote, the Social Democrats claimed 43 seats, but their coalition partners the Left Alliance, Green League, and Centre Party lost 5, 7, and 8 seats, respectively (the coalition’s final member, the Swedish People’s Party, held steady with 9 seats). No party had enough of a presence in the new Eduskunta to form a majority government, but, as the first-place finisher, the NCP (and Orpo) was given the first opportunity to put together a ruling coalition. In June Orpo became prime minister at the head of coalition government that included the NCP, the Christian Democrats, the Swedish People’s Party, and the Finns.