FINLAND: Pliant President

When the Russians recently agreed to dismantle their naval base at Porkkala and return the area to Finland, their immediate aim was to persuade the Finns to elect a pro-Russian successor to old (85) President Juho Paasikivi, who is the only non-Communist chief of state to hold the Soviet Order of Lenin. Last week the newly chosen Electoral College picked pliable Premier Urho Kekkonen, 55, who has stood close behind Paasikivi in tiny, democratic Finland’s enforced dealings with the Russian Communists.

Lawyer Kekkonen, city-bred boss of Finland’s Agrarian Party, squeaked in for his six-year term after the most protracted balloting in the republic’s 38-year history. His final 151-149 victory came only after the Communists threw him their 56 votes. Though all Finns agree that they have to stay on good terms with their powerful neighbors, Kekkonen’s frank campaign for a be-sweet-to-the-Russians policy galled the stubbornly independent souls of many Finns. Kekkonen maintained that a policy of appeasement won Porkkala back, and might yet persuade the Russians to hand over the “lost province” of Karelia. Porkkala, twelve miles southwest of Helsinki, was returned with great ceremony by the Russians last month.

Union leaders threatened to call a general strike for March 1, the day Kekkonen becomes President. The President-elect’s first move was to pick his defeated rival, Social Democrat Karl-August Fagerholm, to form the new government. Finns took this as fresh evidence that Kekkonen is his country’s shrewdest politician. If the unions strike, they will be striking against a Socialist Premier.