Finland’s Sanna Marin will become the world’s youngest prime minister at the age of 34.
Her Social Democratic party picked the transport minister after its leader, Antti Rinne, resigned as PM. She will be sworn in this week.
With four other parties, she will lead a centre-left coalition, all headed by women, three of whom are under 35.
Antti Rinne stepped down after losing the confidence of a coalition member over his handling of a postal strike.
Marin will be the world’s youngest sitting prime minister. New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern is 39, while Ukrainian premier Oleksiy Honcharuk is 35. She will be the third female prime minister in the Nordic country.
Sanna Marin was raised in a “rainbow family”, living in a rented apartment with her mother and her mother’s female partner. She told the Menaiset website (in Finnish) in 2015 that as a child she felt “invisible” because she was unable to talk openly about her family.
But she said her mother had always been supportive and made her believe she could do anything she wanted. She was the first person in her family to go to university. At the age of 27, she became an MP in 2015.
She has been transport and communications minister since June and has a 22-month-old daughter.