Seventy per cent of the electorate, 899,347 men and women in total, voted in the first elections to the new eduskunta in March 1907. The elections were a disappointment for the liberal-constitutionalist wing of Finnish nationalism, the Young Finns, who secured only twenty-six seats. Their Old Finn rivals managed to overcome accusations of having complied with the Bobrikov regime, winning fifty-nine seats, thanks in part to a radical programme. A newcomer to the political arena, the Agrarian Union (Maalaisliitto), took nine seats in northern and eastern Finland, largely at the expense of the Young Finns, from whence came most of the leadership of the new party.

It was, however, the left that fared best in the first democratic parliamentary elections in Finland. The Social Democratic Party took over one third of the votes cast, winning eighty of the two hundred seats. The real strength of the party lay in central and south-western Finland, and especially in the countryside, amongst the leasehold farmers and landless poor. It fared less well in Ostrobothnia and the north, where freehold farmers tended to dominate the local community, and in the Swedish-speaking coastal regions, where the Swedish People's Party (Svenska folkpartiet, SFP) scooped the pool. Social democracy continued to increase its support right up to the revolution of 1917, winning ninety seats in 1913, and an absolute majority of a hundred and three seats in the wartime elections of 1916.