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One day last fall, attendees inside a lecture hall at the University of California, Los Angeles, sat eagerly awaiting the arrival of Sanna Marin, the former prime minister of Finland, who became the world’s youngest premier, male or female, when she took office in 2019 at age 34. Tickets sold out in two hours; there was an overflow room and a Zoom link for those who weren’t lucky enough to snag a spot.
“It was like getting tickets to see the Rolling Stones,” says Leslie Johns, professor of political science and law, and associate director of UCLA’s Burkle Center for International Relations, which sponsored the lecture. The crowd was especially excited to hear Marin speak about how she led her country to join NATO in the wake of Russia’s war in Ukraine. “How many people do that in their lifetime, let alone their midthirties?” Johns says, marveling.
It’s true, Sanna Marin is about the closest thing global politics has to a rock star. She’s worn leather jackets to meet with fellow world leaders and has 1 million followers on Instagram, where her feed features snaps of her posing with celebrities and partying with friends at music festivals.
In her nearly four years as prime minister, she was praised for her deft handling of COVID, climate change, and the war. Yet despite her accomplishments, outside of poli-sci circles Marin is known mostly for her dance moves, following the leak of a video in August 2022 that showed her and her friends dancing at a private party. In reporting this article over the past several months, I’ve told people here and there about what I’m working on, and everyone from friends to Uber drivers to the jewelry security guards on set at the photo shoot for this story said something to the effect of “Oh yeah, the partying prime minister.”
At first I thought it was a tragedy that this history-making politician was best known for the sexism-laced scandals she’s weathered over how she dressed and socialized. But then I watched how Marin carried on after each headline-making turn: She was still living her life like a normal thirtysomething woman, uncensored and unashamed. Before long, I realized that in refusing to be anything other than exactly who she is, while continuing to do her job with aplomb, Marin was in effect proving to the world, and all of its women, that there’s room for them in the political arena, too. And that’s not a bad thing to be known for at all.
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“This is why I didn’t want to change myself,” Marin tells me on the rooftop of the Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills, where she’s staying. “I wanted to show the younger generation, especially young women, that you can be yourself. You don’t have to become something else; you don’t have to be an older man. We need diversity. We don’t need more gray-suited people.”
We had arranged to meet a few hours before the event at UCLA. While I wait for Marin to arrive, her former chief of staff tells me they’d had a meeting at Netflix that morning. They are in Los Angeles for just a few days—Marin’s first time in L.A.—and the schedule is packed. The following night, I see photos of Marin posing with Sharon Stone at the Finnish ambassador’s residence.
It’s early October, roughly a month since Marin embarked on a new chapter for herself. This past April, the coalition government she led narrowly failed to win enough seats to maintain its majority (Marin’s party increased its number of seats, but other parties in the coalition lost more than hers gained). So in June, Marin left the prime minister’s office, and three months later, surprised the world by announcing she was stepping down as party leader and leaving parliament, effectively retiring from Finnish politics at age 37. “After being prime minister, you want new challenges,” she tells me. “I served as parliamentarian before, and I need new challenges ahead of me. I’m really excited about it—we will see what the future will bring.” An air of possibility surrounds her now; the world has never had a former female prime minister this young.
Marin arrives by herself, no security, wearing a monochrome cream look: slacks, a silky spaghetti-strap tank, and a headband, with an Apple Watch, simple gold jewelry, and red lipstick. We discuss our coffee orders—Marin tells me Finns drink more coffee than anyone in the world, joking that she herself drinks about 15 cups a day. She does have the energy of a well-caffeinated person, although her demeanor is serious and intensely dedicated. None of my attempts at humor land.
She tells me that she was born in Helsinki, but moved as a child to Pirkkala, a community of 20,000-plus outside of Tampere, one of Finland’s largest cities. Her mom and dad split up when she was an infant; she lived with her mom and her partner, a woman who helped raise her. Marin calls them a “rainbow family,” and says in the ’90s, no one talked about how she had two moms: “There was silence on the matter.” But when she told her family’s story as an adult, she heard from people who “reached out to me and said they were also raised in a rainbow family in the same town,” she says. “But like me, they always thought they were the only ones.” (Her mother and her partner split up when Marin was in high school.)
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Her mother was raised in an orphanage and started working when she was 15. She had Sanna when she was 23 and, before long, became a single mother. “We were, by Nordic standards, poor,” Marin says. “It shaped my way of thinking, how I see people, how I see the structures in our society.”
Marin was the first in her family to go to both high school and university, a beneficiary of Finnish welfare and its public education system, which is free from day care through college. She got her first taste of politics at the University of Tampere, where she completed her bachelor’s and received her master’s in administrative science. She served as a representative in the student government and tells me about a time when the students were opposed to the way the administration was choosing a new chancellor: Out of about 150 people in the room, she was the only one who had the guts to say what everyone was thinking. “Everybody was like, ‘Can you say this out loud?’” Marin says. “I wasn’t ever afraid of taking a stand. I say what I think and I really mean what I say, even if that way of thinking isn’t always the most popular or feels too radical at the time.”
I say it sounds like she has a lot of confidence. “Or maybe I’m stupidly brave,” she says, before adding: “But it was noticed.”
Marin also joined the youth wing of the Social Democratic Party when she was at college, and began campaigning for causes she believed in—climate neutrality, parental leave, education reform. Less than two decades later, as prime minister, she had the satisfaction of enacting policies on the issues she had first championed as a student. “It was really fulfilling,” she says. “I can understand that people feel very frustrated that politics is so slow, but if you work on it, it will happen.” She draws a comparison with her own life: When she was elected prime minister, “it might have looked like it happened overnight, but I’ve been in politics for almost 20 years.”
Her now ex-husband, Markus Räikkönen, a former soccer player turned venture capital investor, who began dating Marin when they were both 18, remembers thinking by the time they were in their midtwenties that “Sanna was a natural, just very talented from an early age.” Even after she lost her first election—she ran for Tampere city council at age 23 and got only 160 votes—he thought, ‘This will work out.’ He drove with her all over, watching her give speeches and connect with locals, and shine in televised debates. “There were pretty experienced older men going against her, and the end result was always the same: She beat them,” Räikkönen tells me. “And everybody was like, ‘Whoa, who is this person?’” She rose to head of the city council and in 2015 was elected to parliament.
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In December 2019, the Finnish prime minister at the time, Antti Rinne, resigned over disagreements about his handling of a labor dispute. As first deputy chair of the party, Marin had to step up. “I remember my closest friends and allies were in my apartment when I was named prime minister, and I said to them, ‘Do I really have to do this now?’” she says. “I was terrified, and at the same time thinking, ‘I will do this; let’s do this.’”
The instant and intense global attention she received as the world’s youngest prime minister took her by surprise. “I didn’t anticipate it,” she says. “And actually, I would have taken some pictures off Instagram if I’d realized the press interest beforehand.” (She says she mainly would have removed baby photos of her daughter, Emma, who was born in 2018.)
The excitement was magnified by the fact that the four other party leaders who made up the five-party coalition government that propelled Marin into the prime minister’s office were also women. Four of the five were under age 35. Twelve of the 19 ministers in her cabinet were women, too. It was a coup, even in a country known for its gender equality.
She took office in December 2019, and we all know now what was right around the corner. “Straight away, we went from normal to pandemic,” Marin says. She worked seven days a week, beginning around 6 A.M. and wrapping around 2 A.M. “It felt like a week’s work was handled in one day, and in a week, it was a month’s work,” she says. Marin says her calm nature and decisiveness served her well. “We were all women, and we thought, ‘Okay, we will make decisions because we have to. And if they are the wrong ones, we will change them later.’ So it’s not an issue of pride or anything,” she explains. “That was our strategy: to learn along the way.”
Emma’s day care was closed, and Räikkönen stayed home with her, working remotely, with Marin’s mom pitching in. Marin held press conferences every day, telling the public what was happening and the decisions the government was making. Finland emerged with one of the lowest infection rates in Europe, as well as comparatively less economic stress.
Then, as the world was just starting to return to normal in early 2022, war came to her backyard. She remembers going to sleep knowing she would likely awake to full-scale conflict. “I woke up quite early and got the message: Russia has attacked Ukraine; the war is a reality.” Finland shares the longest border with Russia of any EU nation and has been invaded before. The Finnish government sent weapons to Ukraine right away, and joined sanction negotiations with the U.S. and the UK.
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Up until that point, Finland had prided itself on its independence, but virtually overnight, Finns realized, “We have to enter NATO, because that’s the only line Russia won’t cross,” Marin explains. She helped lead her country to join the alliance; it was the fastest accession in NATO’s 74-year modern history. “I felt it was the biggest thing we could do to ensure peace in the future,” she says. “It was to ensure there will never again be war on Finnish soil.”
She visited Ukraine twice after the war began, seeing mass graves in Bucha and wounded soldiers in hospitals. “We have to be very tough and solid and brave and strong in our support,” she says now. “It is so important to make sure that Ukraine will win the war and Russia will lose. This is not only a matter of Ukraine, or of Europe, it’s a matter of the whole democratic world. If authoritarian regimes think they can act like this, that they can invade another country, then nobody’s safe.” Doubling down with her trademark directness, she adds: “I don’t personally believe there should be some face-saving solution for Putin. I think we should get rid of Putin.”
Through the pandemic and war, Marin leaned on her fellow party leaders. “Of course, we have very tough negotiations; politics are still politics, but as women, we also supported each other,” she says. “After the negotiations, we shared stories about balancing family and working life.” Three of the five leaders had babies and took parental leave during the coalition’s four years in power.
Li Andersson, who heads the Left Alliance party and was part of the coalition, tells me that after hours, the leaders sometimes gathered at the prime minister’s residence to visit the sauna in the yard or listen to playlists Marin had made. “In those moments, you’re just a thirtysomething woman talking about your kids and putting on your favorite music,” Andersson says.
Of course, the dancing elephant in the room is that at the same time that Marin was dealing with COVID and war, she was battling personal blows in the media. Her first brush with the tabloids came less than a year after she took office as prime minister. Marin had agreed to pose for a Finnish magazine photo shoot as part of a profile. She gave them 15 minutes. When she walked in, they handed her a suit and some jewelry; she put it on, flashed a smile, and went on with her day. But when the image was published in October 2020, critics were scandalized by her wearing a blazer with no shirt underneath. “How could she??” Marin says, describing the media tenor. “It’s all related to the fact that we, as a society, still think that it is our right, and actually our obligation, to decide how women should act, behave, and look.” (Women around the world posted selfies of themselves in blazers with the hashtag #ImWithSanna in the aftermath.)
Tabloids first latched onto the party-girl narrative in December 2021, when Marin stayed out with her husband celebrating Independence Day until 4 A.M. and missed a text message instructing her to isolate due to a possible COVID exposure. And then came the dance video in August 2022. If Marin knows who was behind the leak, she doesn’t tell me, but she says she doesn’t think it was anyone close to her. Though she’s unapologetic about her behavior, the leak took a toll. “It felt like such an invasion and intrusion of my privacy and life,” she says. “It was hard, it was violating, and I felt it as a personal attack, so it was real emotion.”
Especially since it came from a rare moment when she could unwind. “I’m always working, and I have two weeks of summer vacation per year. Of course, I’m not drinking when I’m at work; I’m doing my job and it’s heavy and I need to be focused. So when I have a small summer vacation and can see my friends, I have a few drinks, I dance—it doesn’t hurt anybody.”
But for women in politics, even minor missteps can lead to a frenzy. “Women are seen as the ones who are supposed to come into office and be exemplary. They’re supposed to be the ones who never falter, just work and keep their heads down,” says Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics. “But the problem with that is when you’re held to that kind of standard, you have much further to fall.”
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There’s an underlying strategy behind the disproportionate scrutiny women politicians face, she argues: “It’s about scaring women. It’s about keeping them out. It’s about silencing their voices. It says to other women, ‘Don’t do this. Don’t put yourself through this.’ It’s pretty straightforward and simple, and it can absolutely have a chilling effect.”
If you’ve never seen the video in question, you might be envisioning something far more sensational than it is. It looks like any gathering you might have with your friends—which might be why so many women (including Hillary Clinton and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) had her back, posting photos and videos of themselves dancing.
Marin is unapologetic and sees the coverage for what it is: “So many of these media frenzies that I have been in the middle of, there’s always this moral gaze: Did she behave correctly? How can she dance like that?” she says. “There’s the moral gaze of everything that a woman does—whether it’s how you raise your child, how you do your work, how you live your personal life, or what you wear.” True to form, she says the quiet part out loud: “This is something that nobody wants to say: The problem wasn’t my dancing. We have seen other politicians dance and sing and drink. The real problem was that I looked too sexy. It’s the way I danced, the way I performed. I looked the wrong way. I was too young. I dressed differently than people assumed. I moved in a way somebody thinks is incorrect.”
But she also wants to be clear: All those scandals didn’t “even reach the top 50 of things I think of when I think of the past four years.”
Her work, then as now, remains her focus as she navigates life as an ex–prime minister. In early September, she joined the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change as a strategic counselor to advise world leaders on policy. Later that month, she signed on with Range Media Partners, an entertainment and talent management company. She’s navigating co-parenting with Räikkönen; they filed for divorce in May 2023 but remain close.
She seems to be enjoying the freedom that comes with being a former politician. “I’m not prime minister anymore, but I’m still partying,” she says with a laugh. In late September, Marin attended her first Paris Fashion Week, sitting front row at Victoria Beckham. In November, she jetted off to Germany to give a series of speeches and then to Seville, Spain, where she celebrated her 38th birthday in a scarlet dress.
Less than a month before Marin retired from Finnish politics, she attended a summer music festival. She posted a series of photos on her Instagram grid from the event, laughing with friends while wearing a hot-pink dress and thigh-high boots in one frame, and posing in a leather miniskirt, a crop top, and chunky heels in another. The tabloids picked it up, exclaiming that she was having a “hot girl summer.”
Marin was seemingly unfazed. She’s determined that, through her, people see that women can be all things. “At the same time that we are mothers and decision makers, we are having fun with our friends. We are playful. We are all these different things at the same time,” she says. “And we don’t have to diminish ourselves at all. I think women deserve everything. They should have everything—like men have always had.”
Styling by Kevin LeBlanc; hair by Clay Neilsen for Leonor Greyl; makeup by Jessica Ahn for Armani Beauty; photographed on location at Oceana Santa Monica.
This article appears in the February 2024 issue of ELLE.
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Kayla Webley Adler is the Deputy Editor of ELLE magazine. She writes and edits cover stories, profiles, and narrative features on politics, culture, crime, and social trends. Previously, she worked as the Features Director at Marie Claire magazine and as a Staff Writer at TIME magazine.