Issues, Campaign and Results

The Finnish Parliament had not been in session during the early years of World War I. The workers´and tenant farmers´discontent with their social and economic problems (the workers still had to work an average of ten hours per day, and the tenant farmers still rented their lands from the landowning peasants, and they could be expelled from those lands if they did not fulfill their contracts´quite strict conditions) was growing. The Russian army´s severe losses to the German army started to awaken among the Finns the hope that they could get back their self-government. The Russian government´s plan to totally unify (Russify) Finland had leaked to several Finnish newspapers in 1914, and had been heavily criticized. Its implementation had been suspended for the duration of World War I. The Social Democrats managed to win their first and so far only parliamentary majority in the Finnish elections by promising more effectively than the bourgeois parties to help the poor and underprivileged people among the Finns (see, for example, Seppo Zetterberg et al., eds., A Small Giant of the Finnish History / Suomen historian pikkujattilainen, Helsinki: WSOY, 2003; Allan Tiitta and Seppo Zetterberg, eds., Finland Through the Ages / Suomi kautta aikojen, Helsinki: Reader´s Digest Ltd., 1992).

Turnout	55.5%	+4.4	http://www.stat.fi/til/evaa/2003/evaa_2003_2004-05-31_tau_005.html & http://www.vaalit.fi/uploads/rfsvyrtb.pdf

Puolue	Seats	%	Votes
Social Democratic Party of Finland Social Democratic Party of Finland The Social Democratic Party of Finland is one of the three major political parties in Finland, along with the Centre Party and the National Coalition Party. Jutta Urpilainen is the current SDP leader. The party has been in the Finnish government cabinet for long periods and has set many...	103	47.29%	376,030
Finnish Party Finnish Party The Finnish Party 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...	33	17.49%	139,111
Young Finnish Party Young Finnish Party The Young Finnish Party or Constitutional-Fennoman Party was a liberal and nationalist political party in the Grand Duchy of Finland...	23	12.50%	99,419
Swedish People's Party	21	11.76%	93,555
Agrarian League	19	9.00%	71,608
Christian Workers' League	1	1.84%	14,626
Others		0.11%	860
Total	200	100%	795,209
Source: Suomen virallinen tilasto 29 A, 8 (Tilastollinen päätoimisto), p. 35.