Sanna Marin – One of the World’s Youngest Leaders Focuses on Equality

As COVID-19 cases spike throughout the European Union amid the second wave of the pandemic, Finland’s prime minister Sanna Marin is urging Finns to do their part. Focused on maintaining Finland’s already highly effective response, she urged people to suspend all unnecessary travel and leisure-time social contacts as “a reasonable ask in a situation as serious as this,” as local Finnish jurisdictions began to witness a greater strain on medical resources.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Marin has demonstrated steady leadership, as she has focused on the needs of the citizenry and called for greater cooperation throughout the European Union in order to address the problem in a more decisive way. In a November 2020 guest column for Politico that discussed the subject, she called for greater EU-wide systematization of the core practices shown to reduce the spread of the coronavirus: testing, contact tracing, isolation, and treatment.

Boosting Finland’s public social welfare spending

In 2019, Sanna Marin was elected as the third female prime minister of Finland, making her the world’s youngest head of government at the age of 34. She remains the world’s youngest female prime minister and the youngest national leader in the history of Finland.

Sworn in as the head of a center-left, five-party governing coalition consisting of all women—with three other party heads also in their 30s—Marin is the leader of Finland’s Social Democratic party. Immediately before she was elevated to the premiership, Marin served as the country’s transport and communications minister, a position to which she was appointed by her predecessor, Antti Rinne. She took over as prime minister after a narrow victory in her party’s voting, after Rinne resigned after the ruling coalition party expressed its lack of confidence in his management of a postal worker strike. Rinne had been Finland’s first left-leaning prime minister in two decades.

After assuming her duties, Marin remarked that she didn’t typically think about herself in terms of her youth or gender, but rather focused on the reasons why she entered public service.

The five-party coalition led by Marin built a platform centered on boosting public social welfare spending and enhancing Finland’s infrastructure. In addition, its leaders promised to help Finland achieve carbon neutrality within the next decade-and-a-half. The policies implemented by previous center-right party austerity budgets had reduced the country’s public spending by 4 billion euros and soured the attitudes of many Finns.

Invisible no more

Born in 1985 in Helsinki, Marin is the daughter of a single mother. After her parents split up, she was raised by her mother and her female partner.

Marin has noted her pride in her “rainbow family,” a public affirmation of differences that have helped similar American families to feel supported by a world leader. As late as 2015, Marin remarked publicly that she had often felt “invisible” as a child and a young woman because society often did not view her family as “real.” But these early encounters with discrimination shaped her thinking on policy, with human equality at the heart of her political philosophy.

Marin graduated from high school while living in the small city of Pirkkala. She served in roles as a bakery assistant and as a cashier. She would later become the first person in her family to obtain a university education, complete a bachelor’s degree, followed by a master’s degree in administration from the University of Tampere in 2017. In 2020, Marin married her longtime partner, with whom she had a daughter in 2018.

A strong interest in policy issues

Marin’s master’s thesis, titled “Finland: A Nation of Mayors,” reflected her country’s focus on local government and analyzed its system of the professionalization of political leadership.

The year she turned 21, she joined the Social Democratic Party. In 2012, she officially began her political career, winning a seat on the city council of Tempere when she was 27 years old. She ran in her first election for a city council position in 2008, but lost.

She became chair of the city council of Tampere, a city whose population is nearly a quarter-million, in 2013.

In 2015, Marin first ran for parliament, and after two years she became the first deputy chair of her party while retaining her seat on the Tampere city council in the 2017 elections.

At the time of her accession to the prime minister’s office, her supporters noted their confidence in her attention to policy issues and cogent thought processes.

A focus on human rights and democracy

Marin and her coalition have voiced strong support for the rights of transgender people and hope to reform legislation to support the ability of transgender Finns to legally self-identify. The existing Trans Act includes measures that require trans people to endure a series of mental health diagnostics and to allow themselves to be sterilized before they can receive legal recognition of their self-identified gender. The European Court of Human Rights, the World Health Organization, and other international authorities have put their support strongly behind the repeal of any legislation forcing sterilization or denying the human rights of trans people.

As a staunch defender of democracy, Marin has also publicly stated one of her biggest fears: that the health and safety closures that governments have taken to curb the coronavirus pandemic will be mischaracterized by populist demagogues throughout the EU to gain political power. Populists worldwide have seized on the technique of blaming economic and job losses on democratic governments’ pandemic-related measures when in reality, as voiced by Marin and numerous other democratic leaders, there can be no economic recovery without taking control of the virus. Therefore, she has pointed out, it is all the more important for the nations of the EU to stand together to quickly and efficiently get the pandemic under control.