Parliamentary elections were held in the Grand Duchy of Finland on 1 and 3 July 1916.
Contents
Background
The Finnish Parliament had not been in session during the early years of World War I. The Russian army's severe losses to the German army started to awaken among the Finns the hope that they could get regain self-government. The Russian government's plan to totally Russify Finland had been leaked to several Finnish newspapers in 1914, and had been heavily criticized. Its implementation had been suspended for the duration of the war.
Campaign
The workers´and tenant farmers´discontent with their social and economic problems was growing; 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. 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.