Or at least the future as we imagined it back then. In the meantime, Marin, like all her European counterparts, has become a crisis leader.

After a few weeks in which she was criticized for not taking more urgent action to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus, in mid-March she did something her country had never done in peacetime: invoked the Emergency Powers Act, allowing for an infusion of public funds for health care and social welfare. She also ordered the closing of the nation’s schools, museums, libraries, and public gathering places, as well as its border—but as of this writing, not its day-care centers. Day-care centers are the heart of the Finnish welfare state, and they are particularly close to Marin’s heart. All that was still to come when I sat down with Marin. Let me take you back—a postcard from the not-so-distant past.

It is a drizzly gray January day in Helsinki, and Marin is crouching by the front door of her official residence, tucking her chatty two-year-old daughter, Emma, into waterproof red overalls. Marin’s mother stands by, ready to take her granddaughter outside for an airing. It is such an ordinary domestic scene—a mother dressing her child—that you could forget for a moment that Marin is actually prime minister. I have been invited to observe the morning send-off from across a receiving room in the residence, a modest 19th-century wooden mansion with a view across a cove of the pale-gray Baltic Sea, which was once the summer redoubt of Russian governors general. The water is normally frozen this time of year, but it’s been an unseasonably mild winter. Once Emma and her grandmother are out the door, Marin offers me a brisk handshake. “That was my daughter,” she says by way of greeting. She’s dressed sensibly in slim black pants, black pumps, and a black button-down blouse flecked with small white half circles, by the Finnish brand Papu. Her hair is gathered loosely at her neck. As we settle into chairs at a round wooden table where a few pink and white tulips stretch their long necks from a glass vase, Marin tells me Emma just had a birthday, but she and her partner, Markus Räikkönen, a communications executive, delayed the celebration. “I was working,” she tells me. Really? I say, feigning surprise. She smiles ever so slightly.

Marin at home in the Finnish city of Tampere with her daughter, Emma, and partner, Markus Räikkönen.

Women in politics are forever asked how they can possibly balance work and family—while male politicians are so often given a pass on the question. But Marin is happy to talk about Emma, as well as her own childhood—how she was raised by a working-class mother and her same-sex partner, and was the first in her family to graduate from university. She would like it known that she is a living example of the benefits of the Finnish welfare state; that Finland’s generous parental-leave policies can stimulate the economy, not hinder it; that its world-famous free public schools helped her get where she is today. And that Finland wants to lead the way in fighting climate change, with a goal to become carbon neutral by 2035. “It’s very ambitious, but I think we can manage it,” she tells me in perfect English, with a hint of an accent.