Mike's Minute: Being a leader is a 24/7 job, as Sanna Marin found out

Published: April 3, 2023, 9:31 p.m.

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Sanna Marin - I said it at the time when she arrived in the country for a visit.

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I said it as the debate here raged, as to a woman\'s right to be herself.

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I\'m talking, of course, about the argument that you could be a leader and still go dancing all night and the fact that she had gone out to a party that turned up on Instagram was fine because she didn\\u2019t have any meetings that weekend.

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Marin was the Goddess of Finland, the soul sister of our own dancing queen Jacinda Ardern, a couple of the planets most progressive, young and female rockstars.

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What right did we have to question her social life?

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My argument was being a leader of a country is 24/7, even if there wasn\\u2019t a war on and even if you didn\\u2019t share hundreds of kilometres of border with Russia.

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You might just want to be seen to be taking your job seriously and, as I pointed out at the time, not having meetings is not a sign of anything other than you may, or may not, have meetings.

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It is not a measure of leadership.

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Well, she\'s got all the time in the world now to dance her nights and life away.

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She lost.

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To be fair to her, she didn\\u2019t lose by much. But they have a system that throws up a couple of major players who, like us, link with smaller players and form Governments.

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But the country has moved to the right and her style of spendthrift policy is over, just as their debt has gotten uncomfortably high. Not unlike ours.

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Which is why we will be moving to the right in October.

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The only real difference between them and us is she hung around to test her credibility. Our version bailed knowing full well her time was up.

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But here\'s the point - the reason this is news is not because Finland had an election, as countries have elections all the time.

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The reason this one has been reported so widely is in the headlines, all of which essentially say the same thing - "Finland\'s Partying PM Concedes Defeat".

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And in that headline, and the many others, is how the world saw her, sees her and will remember her.

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When the social life makes the headlines over the substance, the fact she didn\\u2019t get it says it all.

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