Finnish PM To Divorce As She Prepares To Leave Office
Finland’s outgoing Prime Minister Sanna Marin and her husband Markus Raikkonen have filed for divorce.
“We are grateful for the 19 years together and our beloved daughter,” Ms Marin said on Instagram on Wednesday.
The couple married in 2020, when Ms Marin was leading the country’s pandemic response, and they share a five-year-old daughter.
She is due to leave office after her centre-left party lost the general election last month.
In a story post on her Instagram account, Ms Marin said she is “still best friends” with Mr Raikkonen, who is a businessman and former professional footballer.
“We will continue to spend time together as a family and with each other,” she added.
Ms Marin, 37, became the world’s youngest prime minister when she took office in 2019. But she lost out in a tight race to the National Coalition Party, headed by Petteri Orpo, and the right-wing populist Finns Party, led by Riikka Purra, in April.
It was a bitter defeat for Ms Marin. While she increased her party’s seats and secured 19.9% of the vote, her coalition partners all lost significant numbers of seats.
Her government has formally resigned but will continue serving on a caretaker basis until the formation and appointment of a new government. Mr Orpo has said he hopes to conclude negotiations by June.
Ms Marin has enjoyed high polling throughout her time in office, with many praising her for steering Finland into Nato and navigating her country through the Covid-19 pandemic.
But she is also a polarising figure in Finland, with headlines pertaining to her personal life surfacing in recent months.
She has frequently been a target for criticism for her apparent love of partying- most notably when a video of her at a party singing, dancing and drinking circulated on social media in August 2022.
At the time, Ms Marin said the video had been filmed on “private premises” and that she had spent “an evening with friends”.
But the video prompted dozens of complaints alleging Ms Marin’s behaviour undermined Finland’s “reputation and security”.
She took a drugs test, which proved negative, to allay concerns about her behaviour and was cleared of misconduct by parliament a few months later.
The incident led to many women coming out in support of Ms Marin. In Finland, women took to social media to post videos of themselves dancing in solidarity.
Source: BBC
