Sanna Marin
Sanna Marin was prime minister of Finland from December 2019 to June 2023, the Social Democrat who took the office at thirty-four, the youngest head of government in the world, when Rinne fell over a postal strike, at the head of a coalition of five parties all led by women, four of them under thirty-five, which was the photograph the world's papers ran. The three and a half years were the pandemic, in which Finland closed the Uusimaa region around Helsinki for three weeks in March 2020 and had the lowest death rate in Europe. There was the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in which she and the president Niinistö announced on 12 May 2022 that Finland would apply to NATO and she took the application through a parliament and a country that had said no for seventy years, and the largest aid to Ukraine per head of any country outside the Baltics. There was the family leave reform that gave fathers the same paid leave as mothers, the rise in the school-leaving age to eighteen, and the social and health services reform of 2022 that moved them to twenty-one new regions. There was the debt that rose through the pandemic to seventy per cent of output, and the party videos of August 2022, in which she danced at a friend's flat and a phone filmed it, after which she took a drug test that was negative and the country argued for a month about whether a prime minister could dance. She was born in Helsinki in 1985 and grew up in Pirkkala outside Tampere with her mother and her mother's female partner in a rainbow family, as she has called it, on a low income, the first in her family to go to university, studying administrative science at Tampere. She was on the Tampere city council from 2012 and its chair, and entered parliament in 2015. She was transport minister in Rinne's government before replacing him. The election of April 2023 gave her party its best result in years and second place, behind Orpo's Coalition by a seat, and third place to the Finns Party, which Orpo chose. She resigned the party leadership that September and left parliament. She joined Tony Blair's institute in London as a strategic counsellor, which the Finnish press took as a comment on the country and she took as a job. She has spoken since for Ukraine on every stage that asks, and has said that the West's fear of escalation is the war's fuel. She is the Finnish politician the world knows, which the Finns have mixed feelings about.
- Lived: 1985 CE – ?
- Nationality: Finnish
- Roles: prime minister, politician
