Book review | Rafael Paasio’s time at the head of Sdp was an unparalleled success story

Nonfiction book

Matti Hannikainen: The reforming party and the welfare state. Sdp’s history 5 years 1957–1975. Bridge. 512 pp.

Sdp turns 125 years old and publishes the fifth volume of its history The reforming party and the welfare statewritten by a docent Matti Hannikainen.

The book begins with a description of the Sdp’s breakup, election losses and isolation in the late 1950s and early 60s. President Urho Kekkonen didn’t let Democrats into government and was able to govern with the support of the Farmers’ Union.

Kekkonen did support the cooperation of the Sdp and the rural union, but the condition was the Sdp’s “unconditional surrender in foreign policy”, as he wrote in his diary in January 1963.

“Foreign policy” meant good Soviet relations, which Sdp did not have at the time.

In summer 1963 A rejuvenation operation was performed under the leadership of the Sdp. Vaino Tanner82, resigned and was succeeded Rafael Paasio60.

Tanner kicked Kekko and the Soviet Union as homework. “The two elections held a year ago were fraud elections. The people were intimidated. It was driven into panic mode. The sheet music thing was a means of pressure designed for that purpose,” said Tanner.

He meant the 1962 presidential election, in which Kekkonen was elected president after a note sent by the Soviet Union, and the parliamentary election, in which Sdp had suffered a crushing defeat.

Paasio did not bark at Kekko or the Soviet Union, but began to improve relations with them and also with the communists. He turned the party line “a couple of points” to the left.

There was an idea and a tactic in the move: a quarter of the voters were to the left of the Sdp and Paasio wanted to attract back the left-wing opposition that had left the party and also courted the young generation, which wanted more socialism in the Sdp’s politics.

Three years after that, the Sdp got a big victory in the parliamentary elections and Paasio became the prime minister of the government of the left and center.

Paasio, who was despised at the beginning of his term, gradually rose to become a powerful figure in Sdp. He united and raised the party from the trough to the largest one in the country, which had the initiative in its hands: Sdp won and the others lost.

Under the leadership of the party, the basic school reform was carried out and the day care law and the public health law were enacted. While preparing major reforms, Paasio said: “This is the kind of socialism that the Social Democratic Party wants to implement in this country at its best.”

“

Paasio united and raised the party from the trough to the largest in the country.

Matti Hannikainen’s book ends with a description of how grateful comrades praised the resigning chairman at the summer 1975 party meeting, where Paasio moved the 100,000-member party Kalevi to Sorsa.

Paasio had picked the unknown Sorsa as party secretary and trained him as a successor. The final work of the education had been Sorsa’s three years as prime minister.

Paasio’s season was an unparalleled success story. Sdp has drawn its strength from that for half a century and still draws.

Only to one Rafael Paasio didn’t dare to go to Urho Kekkonsen. Sdp “gave in”, supported Kekkonen’s re-election in the 1968 elections and a four-year extension under the exceptional law. Even before his resignation, Paasio asked Kekko to become a candidate for the 1978 elections.

“With these decisions, Sdp secured domestic political influence and the eastern sector. However, the success of the party that most clearly represented the direction of social change towards an industrialized wage labor society and a welfare state would have culminated in a presidential candidate from his own party,” Hannikainen admits.

Securing the “Eastern sector” meant continuous support for Kekkonen, because the Soviet leadership did not want a change. The same thing happened in the spring of 1975. Sdp was the first party to ask Kekko as a candidate on April 23.

Leonid Brezhnev however, the representative had already gone to take a further promise from Kekkon three months earlier. “If I am needed, I must be available,” the president wrote in his diary on January 22.

Matti Hannikainen Picture: Jani Kaunismäki

Matti Hannikainen continue from where to Mikko Majander finished in the fourth part of the Sdp’s history The party of cold war and conflict (HS 7.2.2023). Both books are quality work in terms of content, expression and appearance. Sdp has made a long leap forward in writing history.

Majander describes how the party fell apart and lost its position, and Hannikainen describes how the party became whole and returned to power. Majander is a master of portraying politics, power play. Hannikainen can skillfully open up how the Sdp pressured democratic politics into the decisions of the government and parliament.

There is also a minister in the book Jussi Linnamon a perfect summary of the Sdp’s line from 1972: “We won’t get socialism in a short time, we don’t want communism and we reject recession.”

Read more: Finland froze when a civil war broke out in the Sdp