President
As President, Relander was politically inexperienced and young. Politicians and other opinion leaders could not take him seriously. Relander had no political base to speak of, and he was deemed to have no particular program for his presidency, which further decreased his support. Even Relander's continual state visits and trips drew criticism, leading to him gaining the nickname of Reissu-Lasse ('Travelling Larry'). He was continually compared to Kaarlo Juho Ståhlberg and his performance as president. The cabinets during his term tended to be weak, short-lived minority cabinets, like in most European democracies of that time. All in all, Relander is remembered as a weak leader. On the other hand, Relander was an idealist who deplored the toughness of political game and preferred minority governments of supposedly excellent individuals over majority governments of unprincipled individuals. While Relander can not be considered a strong President, he did a few notable things during his single term: he allowed the Social Democrats to form a minority government (1926–27), appointed Finland's first female Cabinet minister, Miina Sillanpää (as Assistant Minister of Social Welfare), dissolved Parliament twice (in 1929 over a dispute on the civil servants' salaries, and in 1930 to have the Parliament outlaw the Communist Party, which required a constitutional amendment and thus a two-thirds majority), and generally speaking supported the far-right Lapua Movement, until it started to kidnap various political opponents. He maintained a rather close friendship with the Social Democratic leader, Väinö Tanner.
In the late autumn of 1930, Relander realized he would not be re-elected, and during the winter of 1930–31 he sabotaged the prospects of his former Agrarian League colleague and rival Kyösti Kallio, so that Pehr Evind Svinhufvud, Relander's former Prime Minister, was elected. In Relander's opinion, Kallio did not talk straight to him and schemed behind his back to weaken his Presidency and help his political opponents. In Kallio's opinion, Relander was a rather inexperienced politician who had high ideals but not enough common sense to implement them. After his term as President, he served from 1931 to 1942 as the General Manager of Suomen maalaisten paloapuyhdistys, a fire insurance company for rural people. Relander died in 1942 of heart failure.
Read more about this topic: Lauri Kristian Relander
Famous quotes containing the word president:
“Colonel “Bat” Guano: Okay, I’m going to get your money for you. But if you don’t get the President of the United States on that phone, you know what’s going to happen to you?
Group Captain Lionel Mandrake: What?
Colonel “Bat” Guano: You’re going to have to answer to the Coca-Cola company.”
—Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928)
“On the whole, yes, I would rather be the Chief Justice of the United States, and a quieter life than that which becomes at the White House is more in keeping with the temperament, but when taken into consideration that I go into history as President, and my children and my children’s children are the better placed on account of that fact, I am inclined to think that to be President well compensates one for all the trials and criticisms he has to bear and undergo.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“I thought my razor was dull until I heard his speech and that reminds me of a story that’s so dirty I’m ashamed to think of it myself.”
—S.J. Perelman, U.S. screenwriter, Bert Kalmar, Harry Ruby, and Norman Z. McLeod. Groucho Marx, Horsefeathers, as a newly-appointed college president commenting on the remarks of Huxley College’s outgoing president (1932)