“I am a human being. I sometimes also yearn for joy, light and pleasure in the midst of these dark clouds,” she defended herself on Thursday, days after videos leaked online showing her having fun and dancing with friends and celebrities.
To clear herself of all suspicion, the Social Democratic leader had taken a narcotics test – negative income.
But the controversy intensified this week after the publication of a photo of two women lifting their tops at a party organized in July at the residence, forcing Sanna Marin to apologize.
According to a poll published on Friday by the benchmark daily Helsingin Sanomat, 42% of Finns say their opinion of their Prime Minister has deteriorated following the affair.
In three years as head of government, the one that the Finnish tabloids have renamed “Sanna the party” has nevertheless built a reputation as a competent and serious Prime Minister, who has been able to lead Finland through the pandemic and then on the paths of the ‘NATO.
“People have gotten used to seeing her as a crisis leader,” said academic Anu Koivunen. “As a politician, she is respected. She is both firm and open to discussion,” agrees Emilia Palonen, political science researcher at the University of Helsinki.
But his mandate was peppered with small controversies more or less based, there on a neckline deemed too revealing, here on breakfasts at the official residence reimbursed by the taxpayer.
More embarrassing, she had been pinned in December 2021 for going out to a nightclub before we managed to inform her that she was in contact with Covid-19.
– “The girl from the shop” –
Coming from a modest background, Sanna Marin was relatively unknown when she arrived – at only 34 years old – as Prime Minister, after an express rise.
The dark-haired young woman grew up in a small town near Tampere in the interior of southern Finland. “In a low-income rainbow family, who lived in rental housing from the municipality,” according to his own account.
“My parents divorced because of my dad’s drinking problem when I was little,” she wrote on her blog.
If her childhood was not marked by “material abundance”, the young Sanna grew up “in an ordinary life full of love”.
She became the first in her family to go to university, from which she graduated with a master’s degree in administration.
To finance her studies, she works as a cashier, which her opponents later used against her.
When she became prime minister, the daily Iltalehti hailed “a store cashier’s remarkable rise to the top of Finland”.
Even the then Estonian Interior Minister, Mart Helme, caused controversy when he called the new head of government a “girl from the shop”.
This inaugural controversy then prompted many personalities in Finland to recount their own rise from humble beginnings as cashiers or cleaners.
Elected MP in 2015, it is through her talents for leading the debates that Sanna Marin begins to make herself known a year later.
In a video that has been a hit on social media, she is seen masterfully leading a marathon discussion on Tampere’s new tram lines, although the debate constantly threatens to be derailed by ever more absurd arguments for or against the tram.
His professionalism had been praised. “Sanna Marin knows how to subdue the rowdiness”, had written the Helsingi Sanomat.