Introduction

In 2019, Finnish politics made international headlines twice. The first time was when the Social Democratic Party won the most votes in the April 2019 general election (The Guardian 2019; Duxbury 2019) and the second was after the prime minister and the Minister for Local Government and Ownership Steering resigned over issues involving a postal strike and his successor, Sanna Marin, became the world's youngest serving prime minister on 10 December 2019 (see Chapter 3). Her appointment meant that the country was governed by a coalition of five female-led parties.

Finland was flatteringly profiled as a hotbed of progressive politics and policies by newspapers such as The Guardian and The New York Times, and by politicians including Hillary Clinton. The hosts for the podcast for the newspaper Helsingin Sanomat, “Uutisraportti”, ended their weekly broadcast on a gleeful note about the attention Finland was attracting in the wake of Marin's appointment. It was unbelievable and exciting, they exclaimed, that William Barr, the US's Donald Trump-appointed attorney general, had asked the visiting Finnish Justice Minister, Anna-Maija Henriksson, for her views on the new prime minister (Peltomaki 2019). Barr wasn't the only American to want to know more about Henriksson's homeland: when she visited a US prison, the inmates asked her about politics in Finland.

Politics is important to the story of Finland's success because effective social policy and the welfare state were the outcome of choices and policies made by government. Of course, Finland's politicians have not always made the right decisions: as we’ve discussed in Chapter 6, lawmakers are still grappling with the thorny issue of social and healthcare reform.