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. Jörgen Weibull Markku Ilmari Henriksson Susan Ruth Larson
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 crisis that 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.
Citation Information
Article Title: Finland
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 13 August 2019
URL: https://www.britannica.com/place/Finland
Access Date: August 17, 2019
Additional Reading General works
Overviews are provided in Laura Kolbe (ed.), Portraying Finland: Facts and Insights, trans. by Malcom Hicks and William Moore, 2nd rev. ed (2008); Päivi Elovainio, Facts About Finland, 3rd ed. (2002); Max Engman and David Kirby (eds.), Finland: People, Nation, State (1989); Eric Solsten and Sandra W. Meditz (eds.), Finland: A Country Study, 2nd ed. (1990); and Finland Handbook (annual), published by the Finnish Tourist Board. Geography
W.R. Mead, An Historical Geography of Scandinavia (1981); and Kalevi Rikkinen, A Geography of Finland, trans. from Finnish (1992), provide comprehensive surveys. A broad interpretive treatment, with a look at the social customs of Finland, is found in Philip Ward, Finnish Cities: Travels in Helsinki, Turku, Tampere, and Lapland (1987).