Competent, reasonable, functioning government doesn’t get much spotlight on the world stage, particularly when there are wars and pandemics going on. So when Sanna Marin took office at the end of 2019, it was noted that, at 34, she was Finland’s youngest ever prime minister, and the fourth youngest state leader in the world. But beyond that, she was sorted into the category “progressive, well-intended, needn’t detain us further”. It is a problem for another day that the left is not really interested in its own side, and the right is only interested in the left when it’s in chaos.
Various elements of her tenure went mainly unremarked, therefore: her Covid response, her announcement that Finland would apply to join Nato in May 2022, her social and fiscal policies that we might broadly classify as “the business of government”. It was only in the summer of last year, when video footage leaked of her at a party, that she became a talking point. Knowing what we know now about the interplay between tabloid and social media – the way agendas are set by traditional news outlets, then amplified wildly by new media’s insatiable quest for outrage – it felt more like a witch-hunt. She took a drugs test in the middle of August, and tested negative. Obviously, the long game wasn’t to lock her up: it was merely to bring her down.
She and her Social Democratic party fought the 2023 election on three things: education from early years to university, access to healthcare, and language and other support for migrants so that they might participate faster in Finnish society. She met the electorate’s priorities, but wasn’t saying what they wanted to hear: even though the centre-right National Coalition party’s victory was unimaginably narrow (20.8% of the vote, to the SDP’s 19.9%), the far-right Finns party took 20.1%.
Other, smaller parties that had formed part of Marin’s governmental coalition (the Greens, the Left Alliance, the Centre party and the Swedish People’s party) took about 30% between them. The proportion of progressive voters still make up a majority but they all lost seats, on account of the electoral system. However tight the result was technically, the direction of travel is rightwards.
Throughout all this, her personal popularity remained high, and her party trusted. She’d been in government a scant three months when Covid hit. People accepted the state of emergency and were (somewhat) happy to participate with the national tracking app (engagement rates were about 50%, compared with Germany’s 22%), trusting its efficiency and that it wasn’t a deep-state data-mining exercise. Every schoolkid in the country had a laptop at their disposal, and internet access has been considered a citizen’s right since 2010. It’s a bit like the Covid response we would have had if Jeremy Corbyn had won in 2019. Don’t shoot me! I’m just the messenger.
Public debt had leapt, though, by the end of the pandemic, and this is what the NCP fought her on: a pretty straightforward, Cameroonian case that everyone needed to tighten their belts, and this meant slashing welfare spending. It is a manoeuvre we will all recognise from 2010, peddling as masochism what is actually sadism, soothing an anxious nation with the promise of austerity for other people. Yet it is quite conventional centre-right thinking, and probably not comparable to the rest of Europe, where rightwing parties have planted themselves on more populist, ethno-nationalist territory.
But the NCP didn’t just win on its conventional, smooth maths; the discourse was always interlaced with the “alt-right” misogynist backlash against Marin the party girl. It suited no one, while electioneering, to try to disaggregate those two forces, but this kind of alliance – again, not unlike the one between the austerians and the Brexiters – always reminds me of a collateralised debt obligation. It yokes together worldviews – small-state accountants with hard-right ideologues – that are nothing alike, and creates something that looks both more valuable and more stable than it actually is, and is in fact more dangerous than you could possibly imagine until it falls apart.
The coming coalition will be hard to fudge. Sanna Marin has described the Finns party as openly racist, and neither the SDP nor the smaller parties of her outgoing government will want to ally with them. The so-called blue-black coalition, NCP and the Finns, will be fraught with dangers, of which not even the greatest is the symbolism of the term – blue-and-blacks was the name of the youth wing of the Finnish fascists in the 1930s. Marin is putting a brave face on the results, but must be chilled by this precipitous descent into authoritarian prospects.
This article was amended on 5 April 2023. Smaller parties that had formed part of Marin’s governmental coalition (the Greens, the Left Alliance, the Centre party and the Swedish People’s party) took about 30% of the vote between them, not 12% as an earlier version said.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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