34-Year-Old Sanna Marin Becomes the World’s Youngest Prime Minister
On Tuesday, the new prime minister formally swore in at the Parliament. Sanna Marin, is the head of a coalition whose four other parties are also led by women, three of them in their thirties.
The Social Democrats of Finland have elected 34-year-old former transport minister Sanna Marin, as the Prime Minister of the country, there by making her the youngest head of government in the country’s history as well as world’s youngest acting Prime Minister.
Sanna Marin won the vote to replace the outgoing leader Antti Rinne with a small margin. Rinne has resigned from the position after losing the confidence of the coalition partner Centre Party, over his handling of a postal strike.
After being elected the Prime Minister of the country Marin told the media, “We have a lot of work to do to rebuild trust. I have never thought about my age or gender, I think of the reasons I got into politics and those things for which we have won the trust of the electorate.”
On Tuesday, the new prime minister formally swore in at the Parliament. Sanna Marin, is the head of a coalition whose four other parties are also led by women, three of them in their thirties.
Former Prime Minister Antti Rinne has headed Finland’s centre-left five-party coalition since June this year. But he has to step down from the country’s important post several weeks after the political crisis over a plan to cut wages for 700 postal workers.
The postal service of Finland also withdrew the reform plans in the month of November, after widespread strikes, but questions emerged over whether or not Rinne had previously endorsed the cutbacks, which led the Centre Party to declare it had lost its trust in the prime minister last Monday.
Now, the five-party, Social Democrat-led coalition has agreed to stay together and maintain the policy programme it has announced in the month of June, focusing on a major increase in public spending on welfare and infrastructure. The government has also pledged to make the country carbon neutral by 2035.
Finland’s third female prime minister, Marin was raised by a single mother. She was the first in her family to go to a university. She is just ahead of Ukrainian Prime Minister Oleksiy Honcharuk, who is 35 years old and New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern, who is 39 years old.
Sanna Marin has enjoyed a rapid rise in Finnish politics since she became the head of the council of Tampere at the age of 27 years. Tampere is Finland’s third-biggest city. She stood in for Rinne as party leader earlier this year when he had to take time to leave because of his physical illness.
