History of Finnish cabinets

Between 1917 and 2007, the independent Finland has had 70 cabinets, 40 prime ministers and above 550 ministers.

 

42 cabinets were majority cabinets, 19 minority cabinets and 9 non-partisan caretaker cabinets. The last minority cabinet and the last caretaker cabinet were in office in the mid-1970s.

 

The average period in office of all Finnish cabinets is only a little over a year, approximately 15 months. However, during the last 20 years, cabinets have usually stayed in office for the full electoral period of four years.

 

From short-term minority cabinets to long-term majority coalitions

 

The political composition of cabinets has changed during Finland’s independence from parliamentary instability towards more permanent majority coalitions. Of the 19 cabinets that were in office before the Winter War, 14 were minority or caretaker cabinets. Even the majority cabinets lasted only for a short while in office. An exception in the series of short-lived cabinets was the T.M. Kivimäki's minority cabinet consisting of centre parties and staying in office nearly for four years between 1932 and 1936.

 

Usually, the non-socialist centre and right parties formed cabinets. The Social Democrats first entered the government in 1926-27 when the party assumed office alone as a minority cabinet. The next time was in 1937, the year of the first red-earth cabinet coalition.

 

During and after the war, national consensus required broad-based cabinets. However, the war-time cabinets were also in office for fairly short periods only. After the war, even the extreme left entered the government.

 

In the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s had diverse and ever-changing cabinet coalitions. The key government party was the Agrarian Union / Centre Party. Between 1966 and 1987, mainly centre-left coalitions, sometimes called as popular front cabinets, were in power.

 

Between 1987 and 1991, a left-right coalition was in office, followed by a non-socialist cabinet of the Centre Party and the National Coalition Party in 1991-1995. In the Lipponen cabinet that assumed office in 1995, the entire left was represented together with the right and the Greens.

 

The traditional red-earth cabinet cooperation between the Centre Party and the Social Democratic Party was reassumed by the 2003 Jäätteenmäki cabinet and in the work carried out after it by the Vanhanen cabinet.  The Swedish People’s Party has been a general party that has been in the government in almost all of the various coalitions.