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The Guardian view on Finland’s new PM: a different type of leadership | Editorial
By becoming the world’s youngest prime minister at the head of a coalition of female-led parties, Sanna Marin reminds us that another politics is possibleThe world’s happiest country, according to an international survey two years in a row, is now one of very few to have a female leader. Finland’s Sanna Marin, who is 34, will become the youngest serving prime minister when she is sworn in later this week. In setting this record, the Social Democrat follows in the footsteps of another young, progressive PM – New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern, who was 37 when her Labour party won the 2017 election, and the first woman to give birth in office since Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto (the male, 35-year-old prime minister of Ukraine, Oleksiy Honcharuk, was the world’s youngest PM for three months in between).Finland, which was the first country in Europe to grant women the vote in 1906, is often regarded by those on the left as something akin to utopia – or at least a shining example of what a big-spending, socially liberal government can achieve. Its well-funded universal education system is among the most successful in the world. Between 2017 and 2019 it ran one of the first trials of universal basic income. This summer a new left-leaning government pledged to make Finland carbon neutral by 2035 – a target accurately described by Finnish Greens as “probably the most ambitious in the world”. Continue reading...
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