Finland · 100 years of the Finnish Constitution of 1919

The coin commemorates the hundred-year existence of Finland’s republican constitutional order. After more than a century as the autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland in the Russian Empire, the Finnish Parliament declared state independence on 6 December 1917. The subsequent political order was initially open. The Civil War of 1918 intensified the divisions between the political camps; at the same time, there was debate over whether Finland should become a monarchy or a republic.

In 1918, Parliament elected the German Prince Friedrich Karl von Hessen as king. After Germany’s defeat in the First World War, however, he renounced the Finnish throne. The republican form of government thus prevailed. Finland’s Constitution Act of 1919 laid the foundation for the new republic and regulated the position of the supreme state organs. It combined a parliamentary representative body with a president who originally possessed comparatively extensive powers. In 1919, the jurist and politician Kaarlo Juho Ståhlberg was elected the first President of the Republic; he had previously contributed to drafting the republican constitutional order.

The separation of powers assigns state authority to different organs: Parliament adopts the laws, the president and government perform executive functions, and independent courts exercise judicial power. At the same time, these areas are not completely separate from one another but are interconnected through constitutional responsibilities and mechanisms of control.

The 1919 Act remained a cornerstone of the Finnish state for decades. In 2000, a new, unified constitution entered into force, replacing several previously separate constitutional acts and strengthening the parliamentary orientation of the political system. The issue of the coin in 2019 thus referred to the hundredth anniversary of the republican constitution and to the continuity of the rule-of-law-based exercise of state authority since 1919.