Votes for Security

Finland, now allied with the Axis against Britain and Russia, bet on an Allied victory this week. An almost unanimous vote by 300 electors gave an emergency two-year term to incumbent President Risto Ryti, who last fortnight appealed to the U.S. to save Finland from the consequences of Axis defeat (TIME, Feb. 15).

Knocked in the head were excited reports from Stockholm and Berlin that Field Marshal Baron Carl Gustav Emil Mannerheim, Commander in Chief of the Finnish Army, would stand for election. With President Ryti still in office, sternly anti-Communist Mannerheim' was left free to handle Finland's darkening military prospects. Many reports had Finland feeling for peace. But Finland's primary aim probably is not peace in itself, but security when peace does come. Cagey, conservative President Ryti is the logical choice to negotiate for Finnish security.

In June 1941, when the Wehrmacht attacked Soviet Russia, security seemed to be with the Germans, who also promised the return of the lands lost in the bitter winter war against the Soviet Union. In the light of recent Russian victories, that decision was a crashing error, however unavoidable it may have been when it was made.

Out of the wreckage, Finland is trying to save the tenuous thread of relations with its old and powerful friend, the U.S. The Finns hope that the end of their long road of misery will at least find Nazi troops gone and no Russian troops replacing them.

Secretary Cordell Hull gave the State Department view of Ryti's reelection. The U.S. was less interested in individuals than in Finland's foreign policy.

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