Swedish Party

The Swedish Party (Swedish: Svenska partiet; Finnish: Ruotsalainen puolue) was a political grouping in the Grand Duchy of Finland, the autonomous province of the Russian Empire that later became independent Finland. It took shape during the 1880s to defend the position of the Swedish language against the Fennoman movement, and was the predecessor of the Swedish People's Party, founded in 1906.

Finland had been part of Sweden until 1809, and Swedish remained the language of government, the courts and higher education even though Swedish speakers were a minority: in 1880 they numbered 294,000, or 14.3 per cent of the population. The party operated in the Diet of Finland, where the four estates – nobility, clergy, burghers and peasants – met and voted separately. The Swedish Party had the upper hand among the nobility and the burghers, while the Finnish Party dominated the clergy and the peasantry.

The party was never founded at any meeting and long had no programme, chairman, field organisation or party discipline; it was a tendency held together by a common stand on the language question. Its organ was the newspaper , started in 1882. The abolished representation by estate and replaced the Diet with a unicameral parliament elected by universal suffrage. Because the party's whole position rested on the estates, it reorganised the same year as the Swedish People's Party.