Born in Lapua — once known as a hotbed of far-right politics — centre-left politician Jutta Urpilainen has carved a prominent niche in Finnish and European politics, breaking the glass ceiling as the first woman to serve in a series of posts.
Jutta Urpilainen, 48, grew up in Central Ostrobothnia. She has followed both of her parents' career paths, at least briefly. Her mother was a schoolteacher, a job Urpilainen held for a couple of years before being elected to Parliament in 2003. That same year, her father, Kari Urpilainen, ended his nearly three-decade career as a Social Democratic MP.
Urpilainen studied music and dance at a conservatory in Kokkola from the age of seven until she was 20, recording a Christmas album in 2002. Besides a career in music, she also considered the Lutheran priesthood, a rare combination with left-leaning politics in Finland.
"I am a professed Christian and as I see it, the values that are important to me are based on Christianity. But at the same time, I think they are also very much in line with the core values of social democracy," Urpilainen said in a recent interview on Christian station Radio Dei.
Instead, she earned a master's degree in education from the University of Jyväskylä in 2002, and began a year's stint as a teacher in Kokkola.
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Political career
By then Urpilainen already had a toe in politics. She was elected to the Kokkola city council in 2000, becoming its first female chair in 2015. She also chaired the Finnish chapter of the Young European Federalists (JEF) which seeks a deepening of the European Union.
Entering Parliament 20 years ago, Urpilainen was well qualified for her seat on the legislature's education and culture committee. She rose swiftly within the opposition SDP, becoming its first woman leader in mid-2008 at the age of 32.
Almost immediately, she faced the first major setback of her political career as SDP support slumped in that autumn's municipal elections.
During her term at the helm from 2008 to 2014, support for the SDP slid from 21 to 15.5 percent. However, in the spring 2011 parliamentary elections, Urpilainen led her party to a second-place finish, even though it lost three seats, and returned it to government after four years in opposition.
In a cabinet led by PM Jyrki Katainen (NCP), Urpilainen became the nation's first female finance minister and deputy prime minister. Striking a partnership with the right-leaning NCP took some doing, though. The main sticking point was Finland's share of EU bailouts for financially struggling southern European states. This was deeply unpopular among working-class Finns in particular, and was helping to stoke the growing support of the populist Finns Party.
In an apparent effort to co-opt some of this eurosceptic disgruntlement, Urpilainen decided that the SDP, too, should push a hardline stance on such bailouts.
As a result, Finland became the only country to demand collateral from Greece and Spain as prerequisites for providing them with rescue funding. At that time, Finland was seen as a country with strong fiscal management that had earned it a gold-plated AAA credit rating.
"Our starting point has been that we will not be involved in new loan programs, helping new countries or providing new support packages without getting collateral. We intend to stick to this principle in the future," Urpilainen said at the time.
In retrospect, experts have said that the guarantees made little financial sense. The investment yield of the collateral has been negative and Finland had to fork out more than one million euros in management fees to an investment bank.
Just a month later, Urpilainen was forced to downgrade the government's growth target for the year as exports declined. Ironically, the only eurozone members that fared worse were Portugal and Greece.
As finance minister, Urpilainen approved a cut in the corporate tax rate, spurring dissatisfaction within the SDP. Union boss Antti Rinne subsequently challenged Urpilainen as chair, narrowly ousting her at the May 2014 party congress. She stepped down as minister a month later.
Despite the defeat, Urpilainen continued as a back-bench MP, winning re-election in the next two parliamentary elections.
Five years later, Rinne became prime minister after the SDP won the 2019 parliamentary elections.
Rinne admitted in 2019 that he had been wrong about the corporate tax cut, which boosted corporate tax revenues by almost a quarter.
Rinne's term didn't last long, as he was replaced as PM later that year by Sanna Marin. Before leaving office, though, Rinne nominated Urpilainen to fill the Finnish seat on the European Commission. It was yet another first for her, as she became the first Finnish woman to serve on the EU executive.
In late 2019, Urpilainen became Commissioner for International Partnerships, focusing on development cooperation and humanitarian aid. She heads one of the EU's largest departments, overseeing a staff of nearly 4,000 bureaucrats. As Commissioner, Urpilainen has often found herself navigating the delicate balance between humanitarian imperatives and political pragmatism.
The 48-year-old Urpilainen, who is on leave from her duties as an EU commissioner, has been absent from domestic politics for several years. She has maintained board positions with the likes of former President Martti Ahtisaari's Crisis Management Initiative (CMI), Sitra and the National Opera, reflecting her lifelong interests in international relations and music.
She still plays the piano, and is now passing that skill on to the two children from Colombia that she adopted with her husband, a foreign ministry official.
Tarja Halonen, a fellow Social Democrat, broke the glass ceiling as Finland's first woman president in 2000, and Urpilainen hopes to become the second. As the last major candidate to enter the race, though, she faces an uphill battle.
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EDIT 23.1.2023: The story originally stated that Urpilainen grew up in South Ostrobothnia. This has been changed to Central Ostrobothnia.