What's in a leader?

Sanna Marin grows down

The Finnish seem to be a historically peaceful people, a society of fjord farmers who do little else than sit around eating pickled herring and dark bread all day, I think—but man, someone over there must really have their eye on regime change, because the past week has been nothing but nonstop leaks of their 36-year-old prime minister partying it up like an Alabama sorority girl during blackout week. Last I checked there’s been some sort of topless model photo scandal, and a twerking video, and a video of the PM in a nightclub grinding on a man who was not her husband, and also one of her in a nightclub grinding on a supermodel. It all feels very European, which is unsurprising, because about 90% of European social life these days takes place in discothèques, which are still very popular over there if you did not know that.

By modern standards Sanna Marin’s party life is relatively tame. She has not yet been caught with her shirt up or her pants down, and one imagines that if that was coming down the pipe she’d be more concerned about this whole thing than she seems to be. By all appearances it looks as if she’s leading a pretty typical life for a Nordic woman approaching middle age, consuming pretty considerable quantities of booze on her off-days and partying with her amigos until sunrise and being sort of free with her sexuality while apparently stopping just short of being loose with it.

And yet, common as it is, it’s all still sort of uncomfortable to see it play out in a world leader. Why is that? Sanna Marin herself is not the sort of national stateswoman from whom we might expect true and classical statescraft; she is, for better or worse, a pretty average person—a child of divorce, a public university student, a mother before she was a wife, all of it fairly normal, if not great. If she lacks the true moral profligacy of, say, Boris Johnson, then she also lacks the stately qualities of, say, Margaret Thatcher or Helmut Kohl. She’s just a lady, and ladies these days—Western European ones anyway—often do this sort of thing.

Still. There is a reason we expect more from our leaders than this, and why we sort of squirm when we see it happen, even if most people suppress it. Defend it all you want, but these little mini-scandals are actually quite tawdry. It’s not a great look to be seen in a club rubbing on a man who isn’t your husband; it’s a cheap look to be seen doing the same with another woman; getting drunk and swirling your hips in front of a camera is high school level stuff. You can almost picture her excitedly crowding around with her drunk friends to watch the playback on the iPhone, just so they can all remark on how hot they look.

At its most practical, a leader’s inclination toward these baser activities makes us discomfited as citizens: It makes the premier look weak, easily misled, a quick mark for kompromat. But there is something more deeper and uncomfortable going on here. A statesman is supposed to exemplify our better inclinations rather than our lower ones; one of the parts of the job, maybe the most important one, for better or worse, is setting the moral tone, of not being a lout or a slut or a reprobate more generally.

These are very good things not to be. You would never advise your sons or daughters to strive for that kind of life. Yet a prime minister’s appearing even adjacent to this kind of behavior—shadows of infidelity, of drunkenness, of juvenile sexuality—is arguably sort of an indicator of the direction in which a national deportment is going to break. (As one Finnish commentator recently put it: “She has shown us that politicians can enjoy the ordinary pleasures of life. They can let their hair down a little. And if they can do it, the rest of us can as well.” I’m sure.)

I suppose most people are past the point of caring about what Theodore Dalrymple has called “the reversal in the flow of aspiration,” where “the underclass way of life and its attitude toward the world” is something that even the upper echelons of society and power are eager to adopt. But there we are. Many years ago Queen Victoria famously chose to include the traditional vow to “obey” her husband upon her marriage to him—her desire reportedly being to commit to the same type of marriage as that of every other young English woman. Such is life’s irony that, nearly two centuries later, Sanna Marin is after the same thing.