

It’s not cold enough in Finland. Everyone is saying it. It’s on the news in my hotel when I wake up – the glaciers are melting, faster than expected. I’m sweating in my thermals. In Kesäranta, the grand 19th-century villa that has been the official residence of Finnish prime ministers since 1919, Dimitri, Sanna Marin’s trusted young adviser, gazes out at the churning Baltic and says, gloomily, “This should be ice right now.”

The youngest female prime minister in the world enters the room. “It hasn’t been winter all winter,” says Marin, gesturing at a sky that is wide and flat and grimy grey. She wears a grave look on her face. “This is not normal.” We are sitting at a coffee table by a window overlooking the sea. Around us, Kesäranta is a study in understated opulence – wood floors are buffed to a high shine, carpets are Persian, and yet the house has a curiously wan, unlived-in feel. Perhaps that’s because Marin has chosen to remain in the apartment she shares with her fiancé Markus, who works in communications, and their daughter Emma, in the city of Tampere, a couple of hours’ drive north of the capital. Look at pictures of their home on Instagram, and you could mistake it for any millennial flat, with its houseplants and pink sofa.

E8156J Villa Kesaranta is the Official Residence of the Prime Minister of Finland. © Hannu Mononen / Alamy Stock Photo

It is 28 January and coronavirus is not yet all anyone talks about, or governments are concerned with. It still feels faraway in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province in China, where the virus originated. But it's already far closer to home than Marin – than many in Europe – realise. The day after Marin and I meet, a Chinese tourist visiting the Lapland village of Ivalo will test positive for coronavirus. A drumbeat of cases will follow. On 21 March, the country will report its first death from Covid-19. At the time of writing, there have been 792 confirmed cases of coronavirus in Finland.

But that is all still to come. Marin doesn’t yet know she will be forced to leave her beloved hometown of Tampere, and relocate with Emma and Markus here to Kesäranta, so she can better manage the crisis. All government meetings will take place using social distancing, and Marin will work seven days a week, to slow the progress of a virus that will define her generation.

Emma will soon stop attending daycare, to minimise the risk of Marin contracting the virus, and the Finnish Prime Minister will be faced with the same problem as many millions of women around the world: how to work and homeschool a child.

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But Marin’s face lights up when she talks about Emma. “She doesn’t understand any of this. Once, she was looking at a magazine, and there was a picture of me, and she said, ‘Stupid magazine! Not mother.’” It’s Emma’s second birthday today – later, Marin takes a moment to show me photographs captured on her phone that morning. Hugging her child, make-up free, she looks like any young mother in the world.



Of course, she’s anything but. At an age – 34 – when some people seem still to be fumbling into adult life, Marin is at the helm of a five party, left-wing, female-led coalition government. Her party, the centre-left Social Democrats, won the most votes in Finland’s last general election. In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, Marin’s leadership has been widely praised as cool, calm, and collected. After announcing a partial lockdown – all schools, government-run public facilities, and restaurants were to be shut down – a public poll found that 66 per cent of people agreed with the measures. Unlike the UK, which has been widely criticised for its lackadaisical approach to testing, Finland has determined to test and track every case.



“It wasn’t something I planned,” says Marin, dressed in the black trouser-suit and high-heeled pumps she often wears in photographs, of her path to PM. She took office in December 2019 after her predecessor, Antti Rinne, was forced to resign over his handling of a series of strikes. Formerly the minister for transport and communications, the Social Democrats were in agreement: Marin should step up and take the top job.

Sanna Marin arrives for a European Union Summit at the Europa building in Brussels on December 12, 2019. © KENZO TRIBOUILLARD/Getty Images

The news reverberated around the globe, with images of her coalition circulating widely on social media. How could it not? Less than a quarter of the world’s parliamentarians are female – and yet here was a government where four out of five party leaders were women aged under 35. Finnish politics, often overlooked – coalitions are seldom glamorous – suddenly seemed rare and exciting. When Marin became prime minister, she was emphatic: politics wouldn’t change who she was as a person. Meeting her, there’s none of the usual bullet-point robot speak. She is, perhaps, the only PM who posts breastfeeding selfies on Instagram, or pasta sauce recipes on Facebook. (Her trick: a tablespoon of caper broth.) “I just want to be honest, and be myself,” she says. “I find it much easier.”



Already, though, she’s been on the receiving end of sexist questioning. At Davos in January, she was asked during a panel event where her coalition meets, as if it were a school coffee morning. “It works like any government,” Marin replied. “We don’t meet in a female locker room and have locker-room talk.” I tell her I felt aggravated watching the footage. “In every position I’ve ever been in, my gender has always been the starting point – that I am a young woman,” she says, with some exasperation. “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.”

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For many, she is a symbol of progression and hope, which can be another weight to bear. “It’s a trap!” she says, of the expectation placed upon her premiership. “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.’”



At this, she nudges a document outlining her priorities across the coffee table. “We have to make sure we’re building society in a way that is not only socially and economically sustainable, but also environmentally sustainable,” she says of her government’s main goals. Her most impressive project is Finland’s commitment to becoming carbon neutral by 2035, one of the most ambitious targets for reduction in the world. Elsewhere, Marin is trying to safeguard the legendary Nordic welfare state for future generations, and tackle the country’s gender pay gap.

Finland has a reputation for being as crisp and clean as freshly fallen snow. The UN ranks it the happiest country in the world. It is the third-best place to be a woman. Mothers have access to high quality, state subsidised day-care centres. It sounds miraculous. So, do they have it all sewn up? “Finland is not a dream world,” Marin says. “We also have problems.”

She’s right. Its gender pay gap was 17.3 per cent in 2017, higher than the EU average. Domestic violence rates increased in 2019. Amnesty International has condemned Finland for not having a consent-based definition of rape: in order to prove rape, you need to show you were either threatened with violence, or a victim of violence. Marin is committed to changing the rape law. “It’s in our government programme.”

And then there’s the stark reality that, like many countries across Europe, Finland has seen the rise of populist politics. The far-right Finns Party is now the second-largest in parliament, and increased its vote share in the 2019 elections. If Marin’s coalition fails, Finland’s long-standing liberal project could crumble. Is Marin worried?

“We have totally different values,” she sighs of her opposition. “That’s no secret. But we live in a democracy and people have the right to vote for whoever they want. It’s our job to give people hope and a way to go to a better future.” How, I ask? “We have to understand the reasons populism is growing,” she says. “One of the reasons is how we handled the Euro crisis, with austerity policies. People lost their jobs, and their hope for the future. This is the ground where populism grows. It gives people enemies, and simple answers to complicated questions.”

If Marin’s entrance to the world stage feels sudden, it’s worth remembering she is a career politician. At 27, she ran Tampere’s city council. When members were torn over whether to build a high-speed tram in the city, Marin got the council to go for it – her first great political success. “We’re building it right now,” she says, smiling. Running Tampere taught Marin about the importance of reaching across political divides to form consensus. “You can only accomplish things with the co-operation of other people,” she says. “This is the most valuable thing I’ve learned over the years.” Her time there also helped her overcome that scourge of millennial women: imposter syndrome. “Of course, I have also felt that maybe I’m not as good as people think,” she says. “But when you spend more time in politics, doing your work, you realise that everybody is just a human being, and every job is the size of a person.”

Born in Helsinki, Marin’s parents separated when she was a toddler. She has seen her father only once in the years since. “If you ask me, ‘Do I feel like I have a father?’ I feel that I don’t,” she says. “I haven’t grown up with him and I would say I don’t have a father.”

After the separation, her mother found love with another woman. Marin praises Finland’s tolerance, but acknowledges that same-sex relationships were barely discussed in the 1990s, let alone recognised as equal under the law. “There was a silence about it,” she says. “And I felt that silence. It didn’t feel good, growing up, that there was this silence.” Money was tight – Marin is the first person to go to university from her family and worked in a shop to support herself. After she became PM, Estonia’s interior minister ridiculed her for being a “sales girl”. “I didn’t get it,” Marin muses. “Most young people work in shops or other low-paying jobs when they are growing up.”

Like many women, managing work and parenting is a family affair. “She’s a big help in everyday life,” Marin says of her mother. “We’re very close.” She speaks passionately about how important it was for her and Markus to split their parental leave equally (each took six months off). “I could go back to work, and he could spend quality time with our daughter,” she explains. “They have such a good relationship now. I think it’s very important that fathers have the right to spend more time with their child because it’s such a unique phase in your life. Our children are only young once.” The next week her government announces an increase in parental leave for new fathers, from 2.2 months to 6.6 months.

When she’s with her family, the public allow her to be Sanna, not a politician. “They let you live your life, even though you’re the Prime Minister,” says Marin. “I can go to a grocery store in Tampere and shop for everyday things. People may stop me and say, ‘Congratulations,’ but that’s it.”

It’s certainly a kinder politics, but that’s not to say Marin isn’t a savvy political operator. She won’t trash talk Donald Trump, no matter how much I prod. “We are very diplomatic,” she says, levelly. “I’ll leave that to the Americans.” The lack of diplomacy? She smiles. “Yeah.” I try another tack. Do we need fewer old white men in power? “If we only have old white men in power, that’s a problem. But there can also be older men, older women, younger women, younger men.” It seems so exhausting: politics, diplomacy, all of it. Does she ever stop herself tweeting something controversial? “Every day!”

There’s a word the Finnish use to describe their national character: sisu. It refers to a sense of stoicism, of determination. Sisu is hardiness, resilience and a can-do attitude. It is a bracing dip in a freezing sea. It is gritting your teeth and shaking hands with your political enemies. It is, I think as I leave Kesäranta, the perfect word to describe Marin. “I want to make sure that everyone can have a good life, no matter what their backgrounds are,” she says before I go. “That’s what I’m interested in: the issues. I’ve never paid much attention to myself.”



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