BROADCASTS.com

Published: Aug. 22, 2022, 10:24 p.m.

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Sanna Marin\'s main defence appears to be she is 36-years-old.

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Sanna Marin is the Prime Minister of Finland, the partier, the nightclub-er.

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A country whose Prime Minister is famous for not being Prime Minister of her country, and in that is part of the problem.

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The other part of the problem is she doesn\\u2019t appear to understand the problem.

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Age has nothing to do with what she does and doesn\\u2019t do.

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36-year-olds might go out night clubbing a lot, or dance in front of phones at three in the morning a lot. But they aren\'t Prime Ministers.

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If you trawl through social media you will find very few Prime Ministers, or leaders of countries, out clubbing.

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She had form of course. She was the one who knew she was a Covid contact but still went out to party and left her phone behind.

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The world wants a say on this, it\\u2019s one of those stories that fires the imagination. Among many other reactions are a large series of 30-something women videoing themselves dancing and defending their right to have a good time.

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Once again, completely missing the point.

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Her other initial defence was she didn\\u2019t have any meetings on that weekend. Good God.

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If that\'s your measure of leadership, how many meetings you have, they have got trouble.

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By way of background, she only arrived in the job after the last Government fell apart after five months.

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Finland is led by a large-ish coalition and her party is the most popular. But no party, including her own, gets more than 20 percent of the vote. So she hardly has large volumes of political capital to burn.

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The point is simple - a country\'s leader is a leader 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

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You want to have fun? Don\\u2019t be leader.

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You like parties and want to be 36-years-old? Don\'t run for the job.

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All jobs have requirements and restrictions and sacrifices and the higher up the pole you go the harder it gets.

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She leads a country that has a 1300 kilometre border with Russia.

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Russia is a problem right now. So much so, she wants her country to join NATO. Europe is a mess, a lot of stuff is on the bubble, and crisis can strike at any time. She needs to be sober, available and have her phone on her.

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That\\u2019s what leaders do.

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What you don\\u2019t want is a leader pre-occupied with drug tests and character issues when there are more pressing issues to deal with.

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Often, and it\\u2019s the case in this circumstance, the worst bit is not the so called crime. It\'s the fact that having committed it you seem to not understand what it is you\\u2019ve done wrong.

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