Sanna Marin raised concerns over what she described as a “very worrying” rise in “conservative, masculine forces” across the global stage during a visit to Dublin on Wednesday.
The former Finnish prime minister was speaking to Newstalk’s Anton Savage at the Pendulum Summit in Convention Centre Dublin on Wednesday, on what she said was her first visit to the Irish capital.
Reflecting on the war in Ukraine, Marin expressed her gratitude to “the US administration for all the support that they have given” adding that “Europe couldn’t cope on our own”. She emphasised the need for Europe to have “strategic autonomy”, saying that this was “one reality that we have to wake up to and we need to do better in the future”.
“The thing that we should learn isn’t that we should depend on the US, the thing that we should learn is actually that we should be more independent. We need that strategic autonomy on defence, on energy, that we learned when Russia used energy as a weapon towards the European Union.”
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At the time of her appointment in 2019, Marin was 34 years old, making her the world’s youngest prime minister. She led a five-party centre-left governing coalition until April 2023.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, she received praise for her cabinet’s handling of the health crisis. She also oversaw Finland’s historic Nato membership, whereby the state became the 31st country to join.
Marin said that Finland’s female leadership during her term as prime minister “had the ability to also shift our strategies when we gained new information”, a trait which she deemed crucial to her government’s success.
“Sometimes I noticed that, maybe, people with bigger egos don’t always have that ability to admit that they might do things better when they collect new information,” Marin said.
She noted a “very worrying” trend where “conservative, masculine forces” are globally coming to the fore.
“We have taken steps backwards when it comes to equality and leadership and we have much fewer women in those higher positions than we had a while ago ... When we look at the elections, whether they’re in the [United] States or in Europe, we are seeing these conservative, masculine forces rising up.”
Asked what her key takeaway from her time leading the Finnish government was, Marin said that “the hard part is to try to learn to understand people”.
“I’ve learned so much during the prime ministership and during my life ... one thing is it’s always about people,” she said.
“Everything is social. I’m not actually socially talented by nature. I’m very outgoing, I’m social in that sense but I don’t always read people – understand about their motivations, their emotions, their feelings, their personalities ... I usually just look at the issues.”
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