Sanna Marin: Finland’s prime minister who wants to stay true to herself

I am human,” the Finnish prime minister Sanna Marin told supporters in the southern town of Lahti last year. “And sometimes, in the middle of these dark clouds, I miss joy, light and fun.”

Marin was speaking following days of headlines about her partying, relating to videos leaked on social media of an event a few weeks previously in Helsinki, where the 36-year-old drank alcohol, danced, and sang along to music in a private venue. She later took a drugs test – which came back negative – “to clear up any doubts” about her actions when further footage of the event showed her dancing with a Finnish pop star. There followed a photo of two influencers kissing, partially topless, at a different event held at her official residence. Marin apologised for that and admitted it was “inappropriate”.

It is not the first time that the prime minister, who was 34 when she took up the job in December 2019 – then the world’s youngest serving PM, and Finland’s youngest ever – has hit international headlines over her social life. In December 2021, she was forced to apologise for going clubbing after close contact with her foreign minister, who had tested positive for Covid. Marin said she had left her work phone behind and had missed an instruction to isolate.

The party storm, in a nation where the bar for scandal can be low given the reverence in which political office is held by a significant number of Finns, carried the obvious stink of misogyny and sexism for some. Many took to social media to show solidarity with Marin, sharing pictures and videos of themselves enjoying nights out – in a similar fashion to when Marin appeared in a photoshoot for a Finnish lifestyle magazine in October 2020 (which illustrated an interview in which Marin talked about the demands of her job) wearing a blazer with nothing underneath. While there were complaints that Marin was demeaning her office, social media platforms were filled with images of people wearing blazers, bearing the hashtag #ImwithSanna.

Gender has been a focal point of Marin’s career for years, and this has only intensified since she took high office. Indeed, much has been made of the make-up of the coalition government when Marin became PM. In addition to her centre-left Social Democratic Party (SDP), the four other coalition parties (the Centre Party, Greens, Left Alliance and Swedish People’s Party) were female-led – and four of the five party leaders were under 40.

“In every position I’ve ever been in, my gender has always been the starting point – that I am a young woman,” she told British Vogue in 2020. “I hope one day it won’t be an issue, that this question won’t be asked. I want to do as good a job as possible. I’m no better and no worse than a middle-aged man.”

However, the current partying stories come at a sensitive time for Marin, and for Finland. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine lent an urgency to a long-running debate about whether the country should join Nato, given the long border Finland shares with Russia (the fact that accession to the alliance would be seen as a provocation had contributed to staying the hand of previous governments). “It is very understandable that many Finns have changed or are changing their minds after Russia started waging war on Ukraine,” Marin said back in February. The decision was taken to apply for membership; Sweden made the same choice.

The fact that the centre-right National Coalition Party (NCP), currently in opposition, has advocated this move for a number of years has contributed to Marin’s SDP falling behind them in polling ahead of elections in 2023.

It remains to be seen how great an effect the current international headlines will have on the standing of Marin and her party. However, Marin’s focus on progressive policies, combined with a strong work ethic, appears to have struck a chord. Twice-yearly polling for Helsingin Sanomat, Finland’s largest daily newspaper, shows that the Marin government has generally picked up high approval ratings.

“She loves this kind of challenge, because she is very passionate about this government’s progressive policies,” Maria Makynen, a former parliamentary assistant to Marin, told Politico when Marin came to power. Makynen said that Marin has strong ideological views, and that she “sticks to facts and evidence, and spends a lot of time examining and studying issues at hand”.

That ideological stance is likely to have been shaped by her upbringing, with Marin saying in 2019 that “people in politics don’t come from backgrounds like mine”. Marin’s family background is a modest one. Her parents divorced when she was a small child “because of my father’s alcohol problem”, Marin wrote in a 2016 blog. She lived with her mother, who was in a same-sex relationship. While there may not have been much money, Marin says there was an “abundance” of love in her “rainbow family”. In an interview for the magazine Me Naiset in 2015, she spoke about the stigma she had encountered around her mother’s relationship, saying that she had felt “invisible” because she was unable to talk openly about her family.

She also wrote in a blog post that she had performed “lazily” at school, but one of her former teachers told the BBC in 2019 that this gave way to a desire to improve her grades. She became the first person in her family to go on to higher education and receive a degree.

“Without the strong Finnish welfare state and its education system, I would not have had the opportunities to succeed in my career. Growing up in a rainbow family, it is obvious that I value both equality and human rights,” she told Helsingin Sanomat in 2019.

She went to university in Tampere – known as the sauna capital of the world – earning both a degree and a master’s in administrative science. There she met her husband, Markus Raikkonen, a former professional footballer, with whom she has a young daughter, Emma. After Emma’s birth, Marin and Raikkonen split their parental leave equally, and she has spoken about why she felt it was important that both spent time at home.

Marin held a number of part-time jobs as a teenager, including in a bakery, and worked in a department store during her university years. She went into politics at the age of 20, and only two years later, in 2008, ran for a council seat in Tampere. Within five years, at the age of 27, she was not just a member of the council but its leader. She later won plaudits after a video emerged of her chairing an acrimonious local council meeting, in which some councillors opposed her plan to put in a new tram system and tried to filibuster for 11 hours. The recording showed Marin facing a string of increasingly spurious objections. She chastised councillors for deliberately wasting time, and the measure eventually passed.

She rose quickly through the ranks, becoming an MP in 2015 and the deputy to the then leader of the party, Antti Rinne. Health issues would keep Rinne out of action through the winter of 2018 to 2019, and Marin stepped in as the party worked towards elections in the spring of 2019. Rinne returned to guide the party to victory, but it was a sign of the regard in which Marin is held by those around her. She became minister of transport and communications in June 2019.

A few months later, Rinne resigned over his government’s handling of a postal strike, and Marin narrowly won a party vote to take over. “I have never thought about my age or gender. I think of the reasons I got into politics, and those things for which we have won the trust of the electorate,” she told reporters after that vote.

The tone of some of the international reaction to her appointment was apparent in comments made by the Estonian interior minister at the time, Mart Helme, who told a radio show: “Now we see how one sales girl has become a prime minister, and how some other street activists and non-educated people have also joined the cabinet.” The Estonian president, Kersti Kaljulaid, later apologised for Helme’s remarks.

As for Marin, who has been through the pandemic and is now dealing with the fallout from the war in Ukraine, elections this year will no doubt throw up more difficult issues – although it seems likely that she would want them to be political ones. As she told Vogue in that 2020 interview: “I just want to be honest, and be myself. I find it much easier.” She continued: “If I don’t make it, if I fail – because I’m a politician, and as we all know, things don’t always go the way we want – I don’t want it to be interpreted as, ‘Of course she failed because she was a young woman.’”