Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin said she still lets her hair down when she’s off duty, despite the furor over a video of her partying last year.
(Bloomberg) — Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin said she still lets her hair down when she’s off duty, despite the furor over a video of her partying last year.
“I have also danced after that one time,” Marin said when asked about the episode during a panel discussion at the Munich Security Conference.
Marin was speaking alongside European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and the two leaders were questioned about the extra scrutiny that women face when they take on leadership roles.
“There are deep-rooted unconscious biases,” said Von der Leyen, who was Germany’s first female defense minister before she was nominated to head the European Union’s executive arm.
Marin, 37, was forced to take a drug test last summer to appease her critics after leaked images showed her dancing at a party with friends. While she received support from prominent women around the world -including Hillary Clinton – the episode also hurt her domestically, with polls suggesting many Finns felt she should have been focusing on problems such as inflation, the energy shock, or the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Marin said that Defense Minister Antti Kaikkonen’s decision to take paternal leave despite the war was a welcome sign that attitudes are changing and it is becoming more normal for men to share parental responsibilities. “He decided that his child is only small once,” she said.
Von der Leyen, a 64-year-old mother of seven, said that the most difficult point in her career had been when she had small children and people asked her whether she wanted to be “a bad mother or a bad minister.”
She also called out EU member states that had pushed back against her determination to lead a commission that had even numbers of men and women. To reach that goal, she asked EU governments to nominate one man and one woman for each post.
“You cannot imagine the outcry,” she said. “There were countries that sent me three men.”
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
©2023 Bloomberg L.P.