Sanna Marin Goes Global

Focus on Finland's opinion on Sanna Marin’s planned resignation as a member of parliament and new role as a strategic adviser at the Tony Blair Institute.

The biggest media surprise-non-surprise dropped yesterday when Sanna Marin revealed that she would take on a new job outside of Finland. This news was about as surprising as receiving an increased electricity bill in the mail.

Marin wants to take on the role of strategic advisor at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, the consultancy-cum-thinktank of Sir Tony Blair, the former UK Labour Party leader and prime minister. First, however, Marin has to get her resignation as a member of parliament approved by her fellow MPs. Marin’s resignation is not as straightforward as handing in a letter. She has to ask to be relieved of her duties. 

The role of a member of parliament is one of great privilege and importance and, in theory, is a role of service, where the member of parliament is expected to serve their voters (and constituents). In Sanna Marin’s case, those voters numbered in excess of 31,500, which was one of the largest numbers of votes for any individual candidate.

Now, just five months later, she is telling those voters “Thanks for the votes, heippa-hei Finland, I’m off to make some serious money abroad.”

The right to plot your own path

Sanna Marin is not the property of the people of Finland, ahead of being a public figure, politician and international superstar, she is, like all of us, an individual. Like all of us, she has the right to decide the course of her life and make her own choices about family and career. However, when she took on the role of MP she knew it came with responsibilities. Furthermore, at the time, she would have known that leaving Finland was one option open to her. 

When asked about her future plans during and after the parliamentary elections, Marin made clear she would stay an MP and embrace the role. Just last Friday, she reiterated at the SDP party conference that she would join her party colleagues. It’s obvious that Marin already knew where she was headed, she had closed the deal with the Tony Blair Institute and then she made the calculated decision to deceive rather than tell the truth.

She didn’t need to tell lies though. Marin could easily have, during her election campaign, when she was repeatedly asked about her future, said that she was keeping an open mind and would look at opportunities if they came along. She would still have been voted in as an MP with a massive haul of votes. Now, her actions leave a distinct flavour of dishonesty on the palate with an aftertaste of indifference to those who voted for her. 

So how will her fellow MPs act? Will she be allowed to resign? There will probably be some instances of making the process difficult and slow, but ultimately, if she doesn’t want to be an MP it is in no one’s interest to keep a person in a job they don’t want to do when you can find someone to replace her who will. The eventual result will be that Sanna Marin will be leaving her job as MP and joining the Tony Blair Institute.

The Tony Blair Institute and its dubious doings

So what does Marin’s new employer do exactly? Well, it advises countries like Kazakhstan, Niger and Saudi Arabia on strategy. 

Blair advised Kazakhstan’s former autocratic leader Nursultan Nazarbayev who ruled over Kazakhstan for three decades running a regime accused of kleptocracy and widespread human rights abuses. For his services, Tony Blair was reportedly paid £13 million for his advisory services.

As for Niger, according to the US State Department’s 2022 country report, Niger’s “significant human rights issues included credible reports of: unlawful or arbitrary killings, including extrajudicial killings by or on behalf of government.”

Then there’s Saudi Arabia, a country where it’s legal to stone women to death and whose regime sends death squads abroad to kill and decapitate its dissident citizens. 

The argument that Tony Blair Institute gives to serving these regimes is that apparently it’s important to continue to engage with them so they can progress towards good governance. History is of course full of examples of how “engaging” with murderous dictators makes murderous dictators change course and embrace humanity, human rights and ethical governance. What Tony Blair failed to mention is that that “engagement” comes with a financial bill, one that his organisation cashes in on and enables the paying of Sanna Marin’s future salary.

And the institute is rolling in money. The Tony Blair Institute has to be one of the world’s leading “nonprofits” making massive profits. In just a few years the Tony Blair Institute grew to a turnover of $35 million (in 2021). One can only wonder how much bigger that turnover is now as the Financial Times reported that in 2021 the institute employed 337 staff and today has 850 employees.

So Sanna Marin has cashed in on her global celebrity. If, however, she hopes to be less scrutinised by the media when she leaves Finland, she has made a miscalculation. She has joined an organisation whose business model is to act as a governance-washing front for repressive regimes. The new job will severely dent her image as someone fighting for human rights and gender equality.

Autocracies can employ the services of the Tony Blair Institute so that they can present to the world a veneer of working on improving governance. The excuse they give every time is, of course, that improving good governance and civil society “takes time”. During that “time”, which will take as long as that regime can hold onto power, the Tony Blair Institute will be on hand to bill them for millions.

So what happens if she gets bored of her job with the Tony Blair Institute and begins to get homesick for the limelight in Finland? Sanna Marin can always return home with her white dress dripping with the blood of dead dissidents and her bank account full of cash paid to her by dictatorial regimes whose kleptocracies robbed that money from their own impoverished citizens.