‘Do I really have to do this?’ is the question that Sanna Marin claims to have asked herself before becoming the youngest prime minister in Finland’s history at the age of 34. The line – which is also the title of her bloodless new memoir’s first chapter – is supposed to convey a winning reluctance and relatability, but neither is particularly convincing. In Hope in Action: A Memoir About the Courage to Lead from the Former Prime Minister of Finland, Marin portrays her rapid ascent in 2019 as near-accidental, a simple matter of rising to the occasion after a series of calamities befell more senior members of the Social Democratic Party. It’s a confected narrative, belying someone acutely aware of how power and image-making work, and who has parlayed this into a lucrative post-premiership career that includes a job at the Tony Blair Institute.

Marin’s tenure is best remembered for Finland’s accession to NATO. In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, she won the hearts of the liberal Atlanticist set with her uncompromising stance on Russian aggression – summed up in a viral ‘mic drop’ clip in which a reporter asks Marin about the way out of the conflict. Incredulous, she replies that ‘the way out of the conflict is for Russia to leave Ukraine. That’s the way out of the conflict.’ She then says, ‘thank you’, laughs and walks off. One wonders how peace negotiators throughout history had never thought of this approach.

During the first months after the invasion, Marin was depicted as a pacifist Social Democrat forced into a pro-NATO position by the war. Finland, after all, shares a 1,340 km border with Russia. But in Hope in Action, we learn that she had in fact embraced NATO at least a year earlier. Marin writes of her alarm at ‘Russia’s growing authoritarian turn’, the arrest of opposition leader Alexei Navalny and ‘devastating presidential elections in Belarus’. Anyone with a passing knowledge of Putin’s Russia will be left scratching their heads: none of this was particularly new. In any event, Marin maintains that by February 2022, she was in the midst of transforming the SDP’s position by stealth. She knew that she could only change her party’s anti-NATO line ‘gently’. As she writes, ‘we would first have to transition from negative to neutral, and later we could come out in support of NATO membership’. 

Marin is intent on taking the credit for this, which means she takes great care to depict other Finnish political leaders as spoilers. We learn that the recalcitrant Left Alliance were unwilling even to discuss joining at first. Even worse, Marin writes that then-president Sauli Niinistö’s response was that it would have to be debated in parliament; this was, she claims, ‘one of the few times during my years as prime minister when I was truly stunned’. Here, we witness what Merje Kuus describes as NATO membership’s ‘two-fold legitimation’: on the one hand it is presented as such common sense as to be beneath political debate, on the other so existential and essential as to be above it.

Marin grew up in Tampere, Finland’s third largest city, raised by a working-class mother and her female partner, in what she describes as a ‘rainbow family’. Her father was an alcoholic and absent. Beyond that, her background is unremarkable – the account of her early life and introduction to SDP politics is dull and thin. There are flickers of substance in the moments when she gives a nod to the Finnish welfare state, partly attributing her success to its foundational support. She writes about growing up during the 1990s economic crisis, which saw GDP drop by 14 per cent and unemployment soar from 3 to nearly 20 per cent, precipitated in part by the collapse in trade with the Soviet Union. A child at the time, Marin recalls cutting erasers in half and sharing schoolbooks with other kids. Finnish children, we understand, are taught the virtue of sharing and sacrifice for the greater good. Indeed, throughout Hope in Action, Marin invokes ‘the collective’ – sometimes to illustrate the qualities of the Finnish soul, at others to give her lust for power an egalitarian sheen.

Marin’s account of her time in Finnish politics is consistently self-glorifying, from her tale of negotiating the sale of icebreakers with Trump (‘In Finland, modesty is very important…but I am comfortable saying that Finland makes the world’s best icebreakers’), to a less-than spellbinding story of negotiating the European Commission’s proposal for the Multiannual Financial Framework. In every scene, Marin outsmarts everyone around her. Along the way, we are treated to platitudinous musings on what it means to be a ‘female leader’, though she hardly mentions the other four female leaders in her five-party coalition (most of whom were also under 40).

Hope in Action has been savaged in the Nordic press (‘she seems to have written a book that is as bland as possible’; ‘chat GPT at its worst’). Finland’s biggest Swedish-language newspaper, Hufvudstadsbladet, compared Marin’s avowed foreign policy with that of the current President Alexander Stubb, who has advanced what he calls ‘value-based realism’, a bland centrist concept that means balancing liberal values with a need to engage with unsavoury regimes. Marin’s worldview as presented here contains nothing of this complexity; though one imagines exceptions can be made when working as a ‘strategic counsellor’ for Blair (where her main role is reportedly advocating for the accession of Ukraine and Moldova to the EU).

The memoir was written in English with help from the American critic Lauren Oyler. In a nice touch, which I suspect is an Oylerism, there is an entire chapter titled ‘Scandals’. Those bored by the minutiae of the Finnish government’s response to Covid will find it a welcome respite, though it offers no new insights. Beyond NATO membership, this is what Marin is best known for: leaked photos and videos from nights out, partying and looking pretty while doing it. Marin presents the media preoccupation with her private life as sexist. Who would care if a male politician went out for a few beers after a football game? Of course, much of the criticism Marin received was sexist. But she also uses the charge to shield herself from more legitimate criticism – as well as, in typically self-aggrandizing style, suggesting that her having a normal social life is an enlightened feminist act: a means of making politics more ‘inclusive’ for young women. Grinding on the dancefloor to the Finnish song ‘Peto on irti’ (‘The Beast Is Released’) becomes an exercise in breaking down barriers and shattering glass ceilings.

Since leaving office in 2023, Marin’s record has been subject to increasing scrutiny. Finland’s unemployment rate is the highest it’s been since 2009 – and among the highest in Europe. Next year, the country will likely be subject to the EU’s Excessive Debt Procedure (EDP); public debt is projected to rise to 92.3 per cent of GDP by 2027, well exceeding the EU’s cap of 90 per cent. Adamant that this has nothing to do with the skyrocketing defence budget, the current government blames the Marin administration’s reckless spending during the Covid crisis. Sanctions on Russia have also hurt Finland’s economy, hitting exports and tourism. The region of South Karelia estimates that it loses €1 million a day from the lack of visitors from Russia.

Since there is nothing revelatory in Hope in Action, one is left wondering what it’s all for – not just the book itself but the elaborate publicity tour, the Daily Show appearance, the book event in Hillary Clinton’s hometown of Chappaqua. What are the hopes that Marin now wants translated into action? Presumably she’s being rolled out as an accessory to her new boss, who is in the running to be a possible viceroy of Gaza. But Marin’s own motivation is likely more banal. In Chappaqua, Marin didn’t hold back. ‘I love power’, she told the audience. Power, she confided, is the thing she missed most about being prime minister. After all the contrived effort to present an image of feel-good millennial relatability, and all the feigned Nordic modesty, it was an admission that finally felt honest.

Read on: Grey Anderson, ‘Weapon of Power, Matrix of Management’, NLR 140/141.