As it was with Scotland’s Nicola Sturgeon and Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand, Marin’s stature on the global stage eclipsed more local difficulties. Foreigners saw a “modern, media-savvy operator” who championed progressive causes in a leather jacket. At home, voters were more interested in “pesky details” like the national debt. To those who held her up as an “international icon” representing not Finland, but a “broad, if often ill-defined” set of liberal values, her defeat is a “tragedy”. To most Finns, it was just another election.

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