HELSINKI — The last time Sanna Marin was in Brussels, she had to leave a meeting of ministers early to fly home and deal with a domestic political crisis.
The solution to that crisis was to make her prime minister.
Just a week after her last, aborted visit, Marin will be the focus of a great deal of attention at her first European Council, stealing some of the limelight from new Council President Charles Michel and new European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
Marin’s youth — she’s 34 — has attracted a great deal of attention in recent days, as has a photo showing the leaders of all five parties in the Finnish governing coalition — all of whom are female. One of the many people to have shared the image was Tom Morello, guitarist in Rage Against The Machine — Marin said she was a fan of the band.
Marin told Finland’s national broadcaster YLE after it became clear that she would become prime minister, “I have never thought about my age or my gender. I only think about the issues which made me engage in politics.”
The new prime minister has been very critical of calls to limit the number of refugees Finland accepts.
Marin was transport and communications minister when she was called back from Brussels to Helsinki by her Social Democratic Party, whose leader Antti Rinne was in trouble over his handling of a labor dispute at the state-owned postal service. He stepped down on December 3 — awkward timing for Finland, which holds the presidency of the Council of the EU until the end of the year.
In the relatively polite world of Finnish politics, she has won plaudits from both allies and opponents for her straight-talking style, although those on the right say her left-wing ideology is too dogmatic and question her ability to build bridges and compromise.
“She loves this kind of challenge, because she is very passionate about this government’s progressive policies,” said Maria Mäkynen, a former parliamentary assistant to Marin. The new PM has strong ideological views and “sticks to facts and evidence, and spends a lot of time examining and studying issues at hand,” said Mäkynen.
She has a lot to study.
Marin chairs her first government meeting in Helsinki | Jussi Nukari /AFP via Getty Images
Rinne had to step down because a key coalition ally, the Centre Party, said it had lost trust in him. Rebuilding the relationship between the two parties won’t be easy.
Marin is further to the left than her predecessor (and often starts her speeches by addressing fellow party members as “comrades”), which will inevitably lead to friction with the industry-friendly Centre Party. “She is the most left-wing prime minister this country has ever had,” said one senior MP from the center-right National Coalition Party, who didn’t want to be named.
The new prime minister has been very critical of calls to limit the number of refugees Finland accepts, and has campaigned for the country to be carbon neutral by 2035. She would like to raise income and capital gain taxes in order to improve care for the elderly, and is dead against NATO membership.
Marin’s politics were shaped by her upbringing in a working class family in the industrial city of Tampere. Her father struggled with alcoholism and after her parents separated, Marin was brought up by her mother and her mother’s new female partner.
“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 the Helsingin Sanomat daily earlier this year.
Swift rise
Marin’s rise to the top was fast and started during her time at the University of Tampere, where she earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees. In 2012 she was elected to Tampere City Council and within months was its leader.
“She was head and shoulders above the others and we wanted to give her a chance to prove herself, which she did — and proved many skeptics wrong,” said Pekka Salmi, who was Tampere’s deputy at the time.
During her years in municipal politics, Marin earned the respect of other council members including Lassi Kaleva from the populist far-right Finns party. “She is a brave and straightforward politician, who’s not afraid of a challenge,” Kaleva said.
Marin was elected the Social Democrats’ national vice chair in 2014 and ran for parliament for the first time the following year.
Marin’s predecessor Rinne was often criticized for being impatient and becoming too involved in the work of other ministers.
The call to replace Rinne as party leader won’t have come completely out of the blue. She took the reins from him during this year’s election campaign when he fell ill, and managed to reverse the party’s slide in the polls.
“She did really well in debates alongside male party leaders, and that gave you the feeling that you could put her in any situation and she would be fine,” said Miapetra Kumpula-Natri, a second-term MEP and fellow social democrat.
“Her goal has always been to reach the top. She has been given many opportunities, but she has always risen to the challenge,” said Johanna Loukaskorpi, a social democrat who is now Tampere’s deputy mayor and has spent many hours campaigning with Marin.
Like everyone POLITICO spoke to, Loukaskorpi described Marin as determined and ambitious, with some going as far as calling her stubborn.
Minister of Education Li Andersson, Minister of Interior Maria Ohisalo, Prime Minister Sanna Marin and Minister of Finance Katri Kulmuni | Jussi Nukari /AFP via Getty Images
Marin’s predecessor Rinne was often criticized for being impatient and becoming too involved in the work of other ministers. “She will have to share the work burden with others and be able to negotiate and mediate between squabbling coalition partners,” said Salmi.
Once the initial goodwill wears off, Marin will face the toughest scrutiny of her career.
“Thus far, the media has gone easy on her, but this is about to change,” Loukaskorpi said.
The new prime minister has already come under fire from the opposition over whether Finland will bring back the children of Finnish ISIS fighters. “At some point she will need to shake off her idealism to achieve meaningful reforms,” a senior politician from the National Coalition Party said.
And it is inevitable that she will have to deal with people, both in Finland and abroad, who struggle to take her seriously because she is a young woman in politics. That won’t stop her, her friend Mäkynen believes: “She has had to deal with those attitudes her whole political career. She won’t care.”