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Finland, officially the Republic of Finland (Finnish: Suomi; Swedish: Finland (help·info)), is a Nordic country situated in Northern Europe. It has borders with Sweden to the west, Russia to the east, and Norway to the north, while Estonia lies to its south across the Gulf of Finland. The capital city is Helsinki.

Around 5.3 million people reside in Finland and the majority is concentrated in the south. It's the eighth largest country in Europe in terms of area and the most sparsely populated country in the European Union. Most Finns are native in Finnish, one of the few official languages of the European Union that are not of Indo-European origin. The largest minority language Swedish is spoken natively by 5.5 percent. Finland is a democratic, parliamentary republic with a central government and local governments in 415 municipalities. Greater Helsinki (including Helsinki, Espoo, and Vantaa) totals a million residents and a third of GDP. Other cities include Tampere, Turku, and Oulu.

Finland was historically part of Sweden and from 1809 an autonomous Grand Duchy within the Russian Empire. Finland's declaration of independence in 1917 from Russia was followed by a civil war, wars against the Soviet Union, and a political struggle during the Cold War. Finland has been economically quite free throughout its history. GDP per capita reached Japan and the UK in the 1970s. After Nordic economic liberalization from the late 1980s to 1990s, it has transformed itself into a high-technology high-globalization economy with excellent results in many international comparisons of national performance. According to the World Audit Democracy profile, Finland is the freest nation in the world in terms of civil liberties, freedom of the press, low corruption levels and high levels of political rights. Finland joined the European Union in 1995 but has stayed outside defence cooperation.

Constitution of Finland defines the political system. Finland is a representative democracy with a semi-presidential parliamentary. Aside from state-level politics, residents use their vote in municipal elections and EU parliament elections.

The president is the Head of State and responsible for foreign policy - except affairs related to European Union - in cooperation with the cabinet. Other powers include Commander-in-Chief, and some decree and appointive powers. The current president is Tarja Halonen (SDP). Direct vote is used to elect the president for a term of six years and maximum two consecutive terms.

The 200-member unicameral Parliament of Finland is exercises the supreme legislative authority in Finland. The parliament may alter the constitution, bring about the resignation of the Council of State, and override presidential vetoes. Its acts are not subject to judicial review. Various parliament committees listen to experts and prepare legislation. The Speaker of Parliament, the first person in the presidential line of succession, is currently Sauli Niinistö (National Coalition Party). Proportional vote in multi-seat constituencies is used to elect the parliament for a term of four years.

The cabinet (the Finnish Council of State) exercises most executive powers and it's chosen by the parliament. It's headed by the Prime Minister of Finland and includes other ministers and the Chancellor of Justice. It can be modified any time by a vote of no confidence in the parliament. The current prime minister is Matti Vanhanen (The Centre Party).

Most of the Finnish people (92 percent) speak Finnish as their mother tongue. Finnish is a member of the Baltic-Finnic subgroup of the Uralic languages and is typologically between inflected and agglutinative languages. It modifies and inflects the forms of nouns, adjectives, pronouns, numerals and verbs, depending on their roles in the sentence. In practice, this means that instead of prepositions and prefixes there is a great variety of different suffixes and that compounds form a considerable percentage of the vocabulary of Finnish. It has been estimated that approximately 65–70 percent of all words in Finnish are compounds. A close linguistic relative to the Finnish language is Estonian, which, though similar in many aspects, is not mutually intelligible with it. These languages, together with Hungarian (all members of the Uralic language family), are the primary non-Indo-European languages spoken in Europe. Finland, together with Estonia and Hungary, is one of the three independent countries where an Uralic language is spoken by the majority.