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On a Saturday night in December of 2021, a text message was sent to Sanna Marin, then the thirty-six-year-old Prime Minister of Finland. The message, however, went to a work phone that she had deliberately left at home that evening; she had a date night with her husband, Markus Räikkönen, a former soccer player turned tech entrepreneur. The couple had dinner with friends, stopped by a cocktail bar near the Helsinki harbor, and then went dancing at Butchers, a night club named to evoke New York City’s meatpacking district.
On Sunday morning, Marin woke up and read the message. It was a briefing stating that the foreign minister might have COVID and that anyone who’d had contact with him the day before, as she had, should self-isolate, even if vaccinated. This was stricter than prior guidance, and Marin prepared for the fallout.
Three older male government officials also went out that weekend, but it would be pictures of Marin at the club, young and photogenic, which were splashed across the website of the Finnish gossip magazine Seiska. On Wednesday, amid mounting criticism from her political opponents on the right, Marin, a Social Democrat, held a press conference in front of the parliamentary building to apologize. Not all members of the Finnish press were convinced of her contrition. One journalist asked if it was a joke or just a coincidence that she had been drinking a Corona.
On social media, the reactions were of a different tenor. A BBC article headlined “Finland’s PM Sorry for Clubbing After Covid Contact” took off on Twitter, with users from around the world rallying behind Marin. They posted comments like “hot girl shit” and “Sorry for what? For being cool? A badass? I don’t accept her apology.” Others were impressed by Marin’s stamina—she was reportedly out until 4 a.m. “I guess maybe universal healthcare means that you don’t feel like you’re rapidly decaying the moment you turn 27,” someone observed.
Practically overnight, Marin, who had been the youngest head of government in the world when she was elected, in 2019, became a millennial folk hero. “At Least Someone Has Work-Life Balance,” read a headline in The Cut. It wasn’t pure projection: helping Finns achieve that balance had been one of her top political priorities. The summer before she was elected, Marin had floated the idea of a thirty-two-hour workweek. “I believe people deserve to spend more time with their families, loved ones, hobbies, and other aspects of life, such as culture,” she said at a Social Democratic Party conference. And, as Prime Minister, Marin tried to model a life that combined work and play. She was wonkish and industrious, pushing through her government’s ambitious policy program, which included extending family leave to nearly seven months for new parents and reducing the cost of child care to zero for more families. But, as she said on Finnish public radio, she was also intent on living “like someone my age.”
After the clubbing scandal, the Finnish media, which had already dubbed her Party Sanna, began ramping up its coverage of Marin’s off-the-clock activities. In 2022, a clip of Marin and her friends dancing at a private party while lip-synching the song “Peto On Irti” (“The Beast Is Released”) was leaked online. A rumor spread on a Finnish 4chan-esque message board that someone in the background of the video could be heard saying “flour,” which, it was alleged, was slang for cocaine. A tabloid newspaper enlisted a “sound expert” to enhance the audio, and Marin was pressured to submit to a drug test to prove that she was not part of a female “flour gang.” Meanwhile, women throughout Finland and female politicians such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Hillary Clinton posted images of themselves dancing, some with the hashtag #solidaritywithSanna. Marin tested negative for drugs, and “flour” didn’t actually seem to be slang for anything, but the back-to-back scandals took a toll on her. Later that year, speaking to a crowd at an S.D.P. event in the city of Lahti, she tearfully tried to explain that partying hard didn’t preclude working hard. “Amid these dark times, I, too, sometimes miss joy, light, and fun,” she said. “But I haven’t missed a single day of work.”
In 2023, Petteri Orpo, of the National Coalition Party, unseated Marin as Prime Minister, forming a government that included the far-right Finns Party. An article in the Guardian paraphrased a tweet about the world having “returned to its natural state of being unable to recognise the Finnish prime minister in a crowd.” A few months later, Marin shocked foes and supporters alike by resigning from Parliament. It turned out that living like someone her age included experiencing millennial burnout, or, as Finns call it, palaa loppuun (“burn to the end”).
Marin is often compared to Jacinda Ardern, the former Prime Minister of New Zealand, who came into office at the age of thirty-seven. In early 2023, Ardern announced that she would not seek reëlection, citing occupational stress: “I no longer have enough in the tank.” But her approval ratings had plummeted amid COVID-lockdown fatigue, and the ensuing election was described as a “bloodbath” for her party, Labour. Marin’s S.D.P., by contrast, gained seats in 2023, and she won the second-highest number of votes of any M.P.; it was her coalition parties that didn’t fare so well.
Marin was, in many ways, at the height of her powers, poised to regain the top job in the next election. Yet, as she writes in her new book, “Hope in Action: A Memoir About the Courage to Lead,” which will be published in the U.S. on November 4th, she, too, was exhausted. “I had coped with all the political difficulties and all the bullshit,” she writes.
The book’s working title was “Our Turn,” reflecting her place in a new generation of political leadership. But, even with the name change, “Hope in Action” still reads as a distinctly millennial text, and not just because the acknowledgments thank Lauren Oyler, the young American book critic known for her viral pans, who helped structure the narrative. As the memoir makes evident, Marin’s life, like that of many in her generation, was shaped by the deterioration of the welfare state in the late twentieth century, an era-defining economic crisis in the twenty-first, and technological advancements that have created an expectation of 24/7 professional availability, forever changing the culture of work.
But the book is also, in part, an embattled politician’s effort to set the record straight. Writing about her night out in December of 2021, she explains that she typically carried two work phones, and had left only one at home. She wasn’t unreachable; she had not, as one social-media user joked, “left a whole country on read.”
I was set to meet Marin for the first time at the Ateneum, an art museum in central Helsinki. It was August, and we were going to see an exhibit called “Crossing Borders: Travelling Women Artists in the 1800s.” I had guessed that she probably blended in when she wasn’t at a lectern or on the cover of a magazine, but I was wrong. She was just as striking in person. Amid what seemed like a sea of Fjällräven windbreakers and faded Marimekko tote bags, Marin was dressed like a preppy glamazon, in a thrifted blue-and-white striped Ralph Lauren button-down shirt tied at the waist, rolled-up jeans, and beige sandals that matched her tanned skin. “I was in Croatia,” she told me. She had just returned from a beach trip there with her seven-year-old daughter, Emma.
These days, Marin has more free time than she did as P.M. but less than you might think if you follow her on Instagram. This summer, her one million followers—Orpo, the current P.M., has around forty-two thousand—were treated to scenes of her in Italy, sipping drinks with friends and cruising the canals of Venice. In fact, she had been in the country primarily on business. After leaving office, Marin accepted (not without controversy in Finland) a position as a strategic counsellor at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, an organization that provides political consulting to global leaders. Marin’s main remit at the T.B.I. is to work on Ukraine’s and Moldova’s accession to the European Union. She was in Italy representing the organization at the Ukraine Recovery Conference, in Rome, and also attended the Global Women Leaders Summit, on Lake Como.
Marin’s media adviser, Iida Vallin, a blonde with a trendy bob and thick black glasses, had suggested the museum setting for our meeting. In particular, she wanted us to visit a section featuring a time line of women’s political progress in Finland. To get there, we passed a portrait by the late-nineteenth-century Baltic German painter Sally von Kügelgen of an otherwise nude man wearing a codpiece. (The accessory was apparently meant to protect the female artist’s delicate eyes.) In a nearby alcove, a blue horizontal stripe was punctuated by key dates in red, such as 1906, when Finland became the first country in Europe in which women could run for political office. A black-and-white photograph of a stern-looking woman with her hair pulled back in a bun was captioned “1907—Hedvig Gebhard, one of the first female MPs.”
I remarked to Marin that it felt odd to be there, given that in her book she expresses an uneasiness with the term “female leader.” “I’m a feminist, of course, but I always wanted to be seen as a person who acts, not as something to be viewed,” she told me. While in office, Marin felt that, as a woman, she often had to steer the conversation back to politics. On Twitter, Elon Musk once commented, under a picture of Marin—styled for a magazine spread in a blazer with no shirt underneath and a statement necklace—“She seems cool.” Marin responded, “And Finland is cool too. A nordic welfare state that wants to be climate neutral by 2035.” In “Hope in Action,” she describes the media frenzy that ensued after it was announced that the five parties in her coalition government would be led by women, four of whom were under forty. “One journalist even asked me, ‘how does it work’ when five of a country’s parliamentary leaders are women?” she writes. “It’s politics, not a knitting club.”
Now that Marin is no longer in office, she has stopped couching her critiques of the Finnish media in niceties. “The Finnish press were, like, smelling blood,” Marin said of the coverage she received. In the book, she elaborates on the press response to the “Beast Is Released” footage:
The real political crime here, we realized, was that I didn’t look or behave like a prime minister is expected to look or behave. I was too informal, too relaxed, and I danced in a way that was deemed promiscuous. I was at a party full of young people at someone’s apartment instead of a staid dinner with eight courses and wine pairings.
I asked her why she thought she got so much flak for having fun as a young woman in a place like Finland, which regularly tops the World Happiness Report’s annual rankings. And weren’t we literally standing in front of a wall that tracked the country’s achievements in gender equality? “It’s something in Finnish culture,” she mused. “We aren’t Italians—our identity isn’t life is for living.”
But a conviction that life is for living was part of why she joined the Social Democratic Party, which had helped build the welfare state. Weekends are a labor issue, after all; in Finland, the eight-hour workday had been a central demand of a 1917 general strike. “The Finnish media never got how important welfare structures were in all of my policies,” she said. “It’s, like, in my spine.”
We made our way to the museum café. “We are the No. 1 consumers of coffee in the world,” Marin said, still in ambassador mode. I began to ask a question about her growing up working class, but she corrected me: “I was lower than working class.” Born in Helsinki in 1985, she became the first member of her immediate family to graduate from high school. Marin’s youth and gender may have been what made her stand out on the international stage, but, she argues in the book, it was her class background that truly distinguished her from most other politicians in her homeland.
Marin’s mother, she says, was raised in an orphanage until the age of nine, and at fifteen began working different low-wage jobs. When she was around twenty, she met Marin’s father, who struggled with alcoholism. She left him when Marin, their only child, was two. Marin recalls once, as a little girl, waiting in vain with her mother for him to show up at a railway station for a prearranged visit. “When I talk about my father, or the absence of a father figure in my life, people respond with compassion,” she writes. “They want to project a tragedy onto me.”
But Marin doesn’t see her life that way. “Because I was lucky enough to be born in Finland, I was privileged,” she asserts. Like every baby in Finland, Marin was provided with a “baby box” containing what she would need for her first year of life—items like reusable diapers, knitted outerwear, a mattress that could be placed inside the emptied box to make a crib. The government-issued box, still given out today, provides for new mothers, too; in some years, condoms and sexual lubricant have been included. (The New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, citing the example of Finland, has made “NYC Baby Baskets” part of his policy agenda.) Baby boxes are functional but also symbolic—they represent the ideal of a Finland where everyone is born with equal advantage, regardless of parental income. Since 2023, the conservative government has slashed the nation’s spending by around ten billion euros. But Marin doesn’t think that Finns would stand for the box disappearing: “It’s holy.”
As a child, Marin experienced firsthand the effects of rapid shifts in Finnish economic policy. She told me that she benefitted from being born in the “golden age” of the Finnish welfare state. Marin’s mother was able to enroll her daughter in full-time day care at eleven months. In the mid-eighties, Finland, hoping to raise its standard of living closer to that of its Scandinavian neighbors, strengthened its commitment to the “Nordic Model”: a series of economic policies that combine a strong social safety net with free-market protections. At first, the country experienced an economic boom, but by the early nineties an overheated economy and the collapse of the U.S.S.R., a major Finnish trading partner, led to a deep recession. Marin was hesitant to attribute her politics solely to her age or her generation, but she did admit to feeling the sharpening effects of the nineties recession: “We all remember, as schoolkids, having to cut our erasers in half to share.”
Daena Funahashi, an anthropologist at Berkeley and the author of “Untimely Sacrifices: Work and Death in Finland,” told me that, amid the era’s rampant unemployment, “it became a privilege to have a job and no longer a right.” Funahashi’s book explores the impact of the economic crisis on Finnish culture. As Lutherans, she writes, Finns had long embraced a Protestant work ethic. But suddenly, Funahashi said, that wasn’t enough: “They were told ‘the workplace of today is faster and harder.’ ” The government had to set up burnout centers, staffed by physiotherapists, nutritionists, psychologists, and “leisure coaches.”
I asked Marin if she had ever considered a career besides politics. She replied, “Well, I never considered this one.” The closest thing to political activity that she remembers taking part in during her youth was protesting the razing of a forest where she and her schoolmates liked to pick blueberries; they sang the Finnish national anthem on the road leading into the woods. “It’s possible we had the idea to block off the street—not that there was anyone there to see it,” she writes. (It was her first political defeat—the forest was cleared.) She did recall having an ambient sense of outrage at injustice and enjoying the music of Rage Against the Machine. Her mother couldn’t afford for them to travel, but Marin got a sense of the larger world from watching “Globe Trekker,” a British TV show with young hosts who hopped around countries like Morocco and India. She also describes growing up in a “rainbow family.” When Marin was a child, her mother began living with a woman. Homosexuality had been decriminalized in Finland only in 1971; Marin thus had an early introduction to the idea that what one did in one’s personal life was a political issue that had to be defended.
Cartoon by Farley Katz
After high school, Marin worked retail jobs while preparing for college- entrance exams. Her wealthier classmates, meanwhile, took out loans to cover living expenses, confident that they could pay them back. (Years later, the Estonian interior minister Mart Helme derogatively referred to Prime Minister Marin as a “salesgirl”; after a public outcry, he said that his words were misconstrued.) In her book, Marin frames her economic disadvantages as an essential part of her political education. “I have always considered all work valuable, as long as the conditions are fair,” she writes. She cautioned me against tipping in Finland, a practice that leftists believe undercuts the minimum wage. “We should work toward better salaries instead,” she said.
By the time she was twenty, Marin had relocated to Tampere, a post-industrial city once known as the “Manchester of the North.” She was living with her boyfriend, Räikkönen, whom she had met at a bar called Emma. (“We totally forgot that was the name,” Marin told me. “We had no idea until recently we named our daughter after a bar.”) One day, Marin decided to attend a meeting of the S.D.P.’s youth organization. “When I walked into the room everyone just stared at me,” she writes. It was rare for a person without a social connection, someone just off the street, to get involved in Party affairs. She found the meeting underwhelming. The attendees were debating whether they should buy lunch for volunteers at an upcoming event. “I couldn’t believe it,” she writes. “These were young people, my peers. Weren’t we supposed to be the most passionate members of the political system? Where was the revolution?” And, she adds, lunch “should have [been] provided, without question or argument.”
Marin enrolled at the University of Tampere in 2007, and there she found her cohort. The school had a reputation as a “red campus.” (The filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki, who is known for his absurdist social-realist films, studied there in the late seventies.) Marin joined reading groups, where she read “all the socialist classics.” The following year, she launched her first campaign, a run for city council, which she lost. Her slogan was “Four Targets in Four Years.” I asked what the targets had been. “I don’t remember,” she said. “They weren’t that ambitious, something about recycling.”
The S.D.P., which Marin officially joined in 2007, was actually an odd choice for a Gramsci-reading freshman. Founded in 1899, it was increasingly viewed as out of touch, but she saw herself as part of a movement to revitalize the once storied workers’ party. The times required it. When the global recession hit Finland, the government implemented austerity policies that harked back to the days of eraser splitting. For millennials, who were now starting out in their adult lives, it was a galvanizing moment.
The Finnish media began inviting young up-and-coming political figures—including Marin, who in 2010 became vice-chair of the S.D.P.’s youth organization—to participate in televised debates. Another rising star was Li Andersson, who belonged to the youth organization of the Left Alliance, a party to the left of the S.D.P. “We were on this show—it translates very strangely—but it was called ‘Hate Evening,’ ” Andersson, who is now a member of the European Parliament, told me. She knew Marin only by reputation: “Sanna was seen as being more on the red-green side of the Social Democrats, so more modern.” (The term “red-green” in Finland describes people who support workers’ rights and environmentalism.)
Marin won a seat on the Tampere City Council in 2012, running as a left-leaning S.D.P. candidate. Using Photoshop, she had made her own posters, which she and Räikkönen passed out on the street. (“I have handed out tens of thousands of flyers,” Räikkönen told me.) Marin was appointed leader of the city council at twenty-seven, the youngest person ever to hold that position.
But Marin’s true star turn came in 2016, after a clip from an hours-long city-council meeting that she led went viral. Marin was trying to move along a vote on a green initiative: the construction of a three-hundred-million-euro tram system. It was a big price tag for Tampere, a city known for its shuttered textile factories. Several council members dragged out the proceedings, with one speculating that unemployed people might “ride around together on the tram as there is nothing else to do.” At the front of the room was Marin, then thirty, training her icy blue eyes on each person trying to stall. “Is Council Member Kaleva seriously asking for yet another turn? Last time, you were reading out a newspaper column.” Marin prevailed, and the video now has nine hundred thousand views, equivalent to a sixth of the population of Finland.
Around Christmas of 2018, just months before the general election, Antti Rinne, the leader of the S.D.P., fell ill and was reportedly placed in a medically induced coma. He recovered, and that June, after the S.D.P. won more seats in Parliament than any other party, Rinne became Prime Minister. But six months later he was forced to resign, after he was accused of mishandling a labor dispute at the expense of postal workers, drawing rebuke from the Center Party, whose support he needed to govern. His coalition fell apart, and, in an intra-party election held to succeed him, Marin won by three votes against a more centrist male challenger.
“Nobody in Finland was thinking about her age or gender,” Salla Vuorikoski, a journalist for Helsingin Sanomat, the country’s largest newspaper, and the author of a 2024 biography of Marin, told me. “We knew her as a minister from Tampere. But when she had that first press conference I turned to my husband and said, ‘This is going to be huge abroad.’ She looked different.”
Before arriving in Helsinki, I watched “First Five,” an HBO documentary series from 2023 about Marin and the other party leaders—Maria Ohisalo, Annika Saarikko, Anna-Maja Henriksson, and Andersson—in her government. “First Five,” which is mostly made up of sit-down interviews and news clips, felt a lot like a Finnair in-flight safety video: reassuring in terms of national welfare but a tad impersonal. (The most interesting tidbit is Andersson telling her friends that Bernie Sanders called to ask about parental leave and early-childhood education in Finland.) “I don’t even remember doing the documentary,” Marin told me. I wondered if the series was flat because its subjects had grown tired of talking about their “lipstick government,” as some critics had begun calling it. As Andersson said, “It was, like, ‘Oh, wow, they’re all making decisions together in the sauna.’ ”
The next day, Marin gave me a tour of Kesäranta, a villa in a leafy part of Helsinki that serves as the official residence of the Finnish Prime Minister. The current P.M., Petteri Orpo, was out of town and had told Marin that she could show me around. “This is very Finnish,” Marin said of her successor’s hospitality. “Even though we’re opponents, people are cozy.” She led me to the sauna—one of more than three million in the country—which was in a stand-alone cabin. “This was one of the few places I could relax during COVID,” Marin told me. “I’d come in here at 11 p.m. and just . . .” She trailed off, miming an exhale.
We wandered around the grounds, which overlooked the waters of Seurasaarenselkä. She pointed out a basketball court, where she used to shoot free throws to decompress. We walked into the main house, and several members of the house staff waved hello. Marin showed me into a dining area that doubled as a conference room and pointed up at the ceiling: “Whenever Emma used to play upstairs, the chandelier would shake.” She gestured out the window. I could see a small gazebo on the water’s edge, and she told me that she and Räikkönen had been married there, in 2020. The pair would split three years later.
In her book, Marin writes, “I remember the exact moment when I realized that the string between Markus and me had snapped.” She recalled that the two of them, years earlier, had enjoyed the Danish show “Borgen,” about a female politician who unexpectedly becomes Prime Minister, putting a strain on her relationship with her husband. “Neither of us could understand why they had to sacrifice their relationship for the sake of her career,” Marin writes. “Now I could. It’s not a conscious choice. It’s just life.” Marin told me that part of the problem was that her relationship with Räikkönen had been a chatty one; they would talk for hours at a time. But many things that made up her day as Prime Minister were classified. Räikkönen told me that he didn’t want to comment on the split but said, “It’s true that, before she was Prime Minister, we talked a lot.” They now co-parent Emma amicably.
Earlier, I had watched Marin and Räikkönen walk their daughter to her first day of school. After they said goodbye, Marin walked over to me and confessed that she had almost cried. As Prime Minister, Marin couldn’t pick Emma up from day care very often. “The day the parliament decided that it would grant me the resignation I had requested,” she writes in the book, “a door that I couldn’t wait to open was the one to my daughter’s daycare.”
Being a Prime Minister is a gruelling job in the best of times, but Marin had to lead her country through a global pandemic, and through fears sparked by the Ukraine War that Russia’s attempts to reclaim former territory would extend to Finland, which had been part of the Russian Empire until 1917. The five parties in her coalition were not always ideologically in synch. As a candidate, Marin had thought that Finland should stay “militarily nonaligned,” the country’s long-standing position. But once in office she saw that many E.U. countries had organized their national-defense plans around NATO. “As a result, the countries that were not part of NATO were left out of critical decision-making,” she writes. Not everyone agreed that Finland should join. According to Marin, Andersson, the leader of the Left Alliance, was “shouting” at her over the phone. Andersson and the Left Alliance maintained that if Finland were to join there should be no nuclear weapons or permanent NATO bases in the country. Andersson told me that the intensity went both ways. “In negotiations, there’s all these dances that need to be danced,” she said. “And I think sometimes Sanna was very frustrated with this. She could lose her temper.” Finland was admitted to NATO in April of 2023.
I repeatedly got the sense from Marin that it wasn’t the pressures of government that became intolerable but, rather, the press’s fascination with her personal life, which she intended to keep enjoying. Hillary Clinton, who posted her support after the dancing scandal, told me that she thought Marin had the right idea: “Keeping your sense of self and your humanity is critical to surviving in public life. Not to mention the whole thing was blatantly sexist.”
I spoke with a journalist named Jarno Liski, who broke a story about Marin that is known in Finland as Breakfastgate. In 2021, he got a tip that Marin’s team was using government funds to cover her breakfast expenses and that the receipts were sealed. It was later reported that Marin’s team had been misinformed about breakfast being included in the P.M.’s benefits, and had also wanted to shield her family’s dietary preferences. Marin’s supporters found the coverage of her breakfast bills sexist, the Finnish equivalent of the “women be shopping” meme. Liski saw it as a straightforward government-spending story but admitted that the press was ravenous for any detail about her life style: “It’s true that if the papers found out what kind of cereal Sanna Marin was eating, they would have printed it.”
“I don’t eat breakfast,” Marin told me, when we stopped by Cafe Regatta, a ramshackle coffee shop on the waterfront known for its cinnamon buns. Marin didn’t have one, but I did—for cultural immersion. I told her that I had taken a taxi to meet her, after reading in her book that she was concerned that cabdrivers were losing their livelihoods to rideshare services like Uber and Bolt. “I think it’s like some sort of human slavery,” she said, referring to how little the apps pay workers. It was the most animated I had seen her in our time together, and I asked if she missed being able to do something politically about these kinds of issues. “It would be hard if I wasn’t still doing it,” she said between sips of coffee, sounding a little defensive.
As an example, Marin told me that the Tony Blair Institute collaborated with the Halo Trust to “help Ukraine demine faster. Land mines are a big problem there.” She has also advised Yulia Svyrydenko, the new Prime Minister of Ukraine. “I think it’s very rewarding, working with governments directly,” Marin said. The T.B.I. has drawn intense criticism in the U.K. and abroad; there are concerns about the overlap between the T.B.I.’s policy proposals, which include heavy investments in A.I., and the corporate interests of its donors, like the Oracle founder Larry Ellison. Then there’s the matter of Blair’s own political baggage. To some, Blair is synonymous with the Iraq War and the Labour Party’s rightward shift. When I mentioned this to Marin, she said, “Many world leaders have a contradictory legacy.” She cited the example of Angela Merkel, the former German Chancellor. “I think she was a great European leader, but she also made mistakes, especially concerning Russia and the energy connections that Germany has with Russia,” Marin said. “We thought, with our logic, that having those kind of close economic connections would prevent the war, but of course Russians didn’t think like this. Putin didn’t think like this.”
Marin’s decision to work at the T.B.I. has divided her colleagues and supporters. The Finnish M.P. Timo Heinonen shared an article on X about the T.B.I. continuing to work for the Saudi government after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and tagged Marin: “Is such an entity really the right place for you, former Prime Minister @MarinSanna?”
I e-mailed Hanna Ylöstalo, an associate professor of gender studies at Tampere University, who has written about the Marin administration. At first, I thought that she suggested a call at 10 p.m. her time. “No absolutely not, 10am!” she wrote. “We Nordic feminists don’t have your crazy working hours. . . . We are no servants of men or market economy.” (I didn’t protest. Two weeks before I flew to Helsinki, I had surgery on my elbow, and brought my laptop to the hospital so that I could send off a story pitch in the waiting room.)
Many politicians take controversial consulting gigs after leaving office, but Marin wasn’t just any politician. “She was very to the left,” Ylöstalo said. “Obviously, she’s free to do what she wants, but I feel personally that she has all the power in the world, and she has all this space to address any kind of political issue. And what does she do? She gives inspirational speeches to political élites and poses with celebrities. So I’m very disappointed, to be honest.”
As one would expect, Marin’s friends and family are more understanding about her choices, and more protective of her reputation. “Is this going to be a good story about Sanna?” Räikkönen asked me. Ahead of the 2023 elections, Marin recruited her friend Nasima Razmyar, then a former M.P. who had left Parliament to work in city government in Helsinki, to run again. “She said, ‘The Party needs you,’ and then she left,” Razmyar, who won her race, said, with a chuckle. Had she been upset? “I think it’s a mixed feeling,” Razmyar said. “On one hand, it was, like, ‘This is too early for you to leave.’ But then I remember that she has achieved so much already.”
Marin hasn’t sworn off a return to government. “It’s too soon, though,” she said. “I don’t have that nostalgia yet.”
The following day, I took a train from Helsinki to Tampere. An old friend of mine named Saara, whom I had met while she was in the U.S. on a Fulbright, had invited me to the city. She lived, funnily enough, in the same co-op that Marin and Räikkönen used to, and she and her neighbors were having what Finns call a talkoot, a sort of community-gardening-and-cleanup event. Marin, when I told her, was excited to hear that I was participating. “That’s so Finnish,” she said.
I also wanted to ride the famous Tampere tram, which Saara referred to as “Sanna’s tram” when she gave me directions. I hopped on a tram car; it had been painted with pictures of Moomins, to mark the eightieth anniversary of the children’s-book series by Tove Jansson. Marin had told me that her favorite Moomin book was “Moominvalley in November.” The last in the series, it’s a sombre tale in which various characters set off to visit the Moominhouse only to find that the first family of Moominvalley has gone away.
When I arrived at Saara’s courtyard, a little Russian girl was standing and waiting to perform a TikTok dance for me. She had heard that an American journalist was coming. I applauded, wondering when she had come to Finland. (The current government has moved to block asylum seekers at the Russian border.) I followed Saara upstairs to her apartment, where, over berry-flavored seltzer, she told me that she would tolerate no Sanna Marin slander. Didn’t she think that the breakfast story was fair game? “No,” she replied. “They were just mad that she bought her breakfast and wasn’t making everything from scratch, like churning her own butter.”
I asked Saara what the prior tram had been like. There hadn’t been one, she told me. The city had relied on buses and cars; there was terrible traffic. “It was awful,” she said. It was almost impossible for me to imagine. The tram is the lifeblood of the city—it’s even red—with a projected total of around twenty million riders in 2025. There are plans to expand it. All at once, I could see why some of Marin’s supporters felt that she had accomplished enough and others wished that she’d stayed and done more.
Back in Helsinki, I watched an Instagram story that Marin had posted that weekend of her and her friends at Flow Festival, an annual music festival taking place in Helsinki, where Charli XCX was headlining. Marin had added a clip of the singer’s 2012 single with Icona Pop, whose chorus goes, “I don’t care, I love it.”
Earlier in my visit, Marin and I had gone to a public sauna on the island of Lonna, in the Helsinki archipelago. I’d been anxious. Between steams, people usually swim in the Baltic Sea, but I was worried that, so soon after surgery, my arm wouldn’t be strong enough. The irony wasn’t lost on me, that I was writing a profile of the Prime Minister of work-life balance as I prepared to die for my job.
When Marin and I arrived at the front desk of the sauna center, we each bought, at her suggestion, a Lonkero, a popular canned beverage containing gin and grapefruit soda which was invented for the 1952 Summer Olympics. As we approached a wooden seaside cabin, I told her about my elbow, and she asked how it was healing. “O.K.,” I said. Then, maybe by coincidence or maybe because an old political muscle kicked in, Marin announced, “I won’t be swimming. My back hurts.” Now it was my turn to mime an exhale. “Also,” she added, “inside is off the record. Sauna is sacred.” ♦
