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    Canada finally faces a basic question: how do we defend ourselves? | Stephen Marche

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    The second Trump administration has been worse than Canada’s worst nightmare. The largest military force in the history of the world, across a largely undefended border, is suddenly under the command of a president who has called for our annexation. Canada could not be less prepared. The possibility of American aggression has been so remote, for so long, that the idea has not been seriously considered in living memory. Donald Trump has focused on economic rather than military pressure, but the new tone in Washington is finally forcing Canada to ask itself the most basic question: how do we defend ourselves?For most other countries in the world, self-defence is the key to national identity. Canada’s immense good fortune has been that we haven’t really needed a strong military to build our country. In the war of 1812, we were British, and the British kept us alive because we were British. There hasn’t been an attack on our homeland since. Confederation, the founding of the country, was the result of a political negotiation rather than a conquest or a violent independence movement. Our military was based on a fundamental assumption about our place in the world, and the nature of the world itself. Our place in the world was to contribute to the global order. The global order shared our fundamental values. Peacekeeping was more our style than defense.Recently, I’ve been working on Gloves Off, a podcast about how Canada can protect itself from any threat emanating from the US, and from every other country in the world now that the US is no longer our protector and guardian. The consensus from military and security experts is that we would be “a snack”.It is far from unusual for countries sliding toward authoritarianism, such as the the United States, to use foreign engagements to justify the suspension of their own laws. Trump has already started trumping up crazy excuses for anti-Canadian sentiment – a supposed flow of fentanyl over the border and other nonsense. His ambassador says Trump thinks our boycotts make us “nasty” to deal with.So what does Canada need to do to develop the capacity to defend itself?The good news is that Canada’s new reality is far from unique. In fact, it’s the historical norm. Finland is a potential model for us. It has lived its entire existence next to a belligerent country that is either expanding imperially or collapsing dangerously. The Finns do not have nuclear weapons. They are only 5.5 million people, next to Russia’s 143 million.Finland’s strategy is whole society defence. Matti Pesu, a senior research fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, and a reserve commander of an armoured personnel carrier, explained that whole society defence does not pretend to be able to overcome a potential Russian onslaught. “Power asymmetry is an absolutely essential factor in the Finnish security thinking,” he told me. “Given how much bigger Russia is, in order to thwart that potential threat, we need to mobilize broadly the resources available in society.”Because Finland is geared, throughout its national institutions, towards self-defence, its resistance to Russia is credible. The idea is not to match Russian military capacity, but to make the conquest of Finland not worth the trouble. “Full societal resources of a smaller nation can actually be enough to thwart the potential threat from a larger power because the costs for the larger power to invade could actually be much higher than the potential benefits it would gain from such an invasion,” Pesu explains. The more capable a country is of causing pain to occupiers, the less likely the occupation happens in the first place.Conscription is essential. The Finns can put a million soldiers in the field within 72 hours. But every facet of Finnish government, from the healthcare system to the national broadcaster, has a role in the security system, and knows its role in a possible military conflict. “A preparedness mindset permeates the whole society,” Pesu says. “From the state level all the way to an individual living somewhere in the country.”To rise to Finland’s level, Canada would need to reorchestrate its entire frame of reference. The prime minister, Mark Carney, has recently announced serious boosts to national military spending: 2% by the end of this year, rising to 5% at some point in the future. But the government has pushed its readiness targets back to 2032. And those are targets that align with our typical military practices: meeting our commitments to our alliances. That money sounds good on a theoretical level. But the Canadian military situation has not fundamentally altered. We have not reset our position.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe period we are entering is a period of deep chaos, of the weakening of international institutions, of multiple, interlocked collapses. Any reliance on international institutions and their restoration is a false hope. If Canada is to remain a stable democracy, we will have to find the stability in ourselves. A whole society defence would bolster us against the chaos that threatens us from every side and from within. In an era of splintering society, conscription is a force of unification, what Pesu calls “a strong democratic linkage”. Canada is a big country, with huge geographical and demographic diversity. We are as vulnerable as any other society to the informational chaos that is overtaking the world, to the incipient breakdown. A whole society defence would be a massive force for unification. It would establish, to Canadians at least, that there are crises we are going to face and we need to face them collectively. The thing about a whole society defence is that it determines that you are living in a whole society, a society that needs defending.Canada has no history of needing to defend itself. In fact, not needing a military is baked into our national identity – and that creates a psychological bind. To preserve who we are, we have to overcome one of our oldest tendencies, one of our best tendencies: our peace-loving nature, our idea of our country as an escape from history rather than its perpetrator or victim.And that leads to a very scary question: what will be the crisis that makes us realize that we need whole society defence? Let us hope it won’t be Canada’s last.

    Stephen Marche lives in Toronto and is the author of The Next Civil War and On Writing and Failure More

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      She compared motherhood in four countries. The US isn’t looking good

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      When Abigail Leonard saw the news that the Trump administration was considering handing out $5,000 “baby bonuses” to new mothers, she realized that she had already received one.A longtime international reporter, Leonard gave birth to three children while living in Japan, which offers a year of parental leave, publicly run daycare, and lump-sum grants to new parents that amount to thousands of US dollars. But it was not until moving back to the US in 2023 that Leonard grasped just how robust Japan’s social safety net for families is – and, in comparison, just how paltry the US net feels.Not only is the US the only rich country on the planet without any form of national paid leave, but an uncomplicated birth covered by private insurance tends to cost families about $3,000, which, Leonard discovered, is far more than in most other countries. The federal government also spends a fraction of what most other wealthy countries spend on early education and childcare, as federally subsidized childcare is primarily available only to the lowest earners. Middle-class families are iced out.View image in fullscreenLeonard traces the effects of policies and disparities like these in her new book, Four Mothers, which follows the pregnancy and early childrearing experiences of four urban, middle-class women living in Japan, Kenya, Finland and the US. Published earlier this month, Four Mothers provides a deeply personal window into how policy shapes parents’ lives. And it has emerged as an increasingly rightwing US seems poised to embrace the ideology of pronatalism and policies aimed at convincing people to have more kids.Pronatalism is deeply controversial, in no small part because its critics say pronatalists are more concerned with pushing women to have kids than with ensuring women have the support required to raise them.“Being ‘pronatal’ – designing policy to increase the birthrate – is not the same thing as being pro-woman,” Leonard notes in Four Mothers’ introduction. A $5,000 check would not have been enough to help any of the moms profiled in the book. Instead, the women relied on – or longed for, in the case of the US – extensive external support, such as affordable maternity care, parental leave and access to childcare.“The book is an implicit comparison of the rest of the world to the US, and parenthood is so much harder here in many ways,” Leonard said in a phone interview with the Guardian. “People are so accepting that things can be privatized and that government can be torn down and that there won’t be any repercussions to that. We don’t think about how integral government policy is to our lives, and for that reason can’t imagine how much more beneficial it could be.”View image in fullscreenIn the US, resistance to increasing government aid in childrearing has long gone hand in hand with a commitment to upholding a white, traditional view of the American family. At virtually every juncture, rightwing groups have been galvanized to stop sporadic efforts at expanding support. During the second world war, Congress allocated $20m to a universal childcare program that could help women work while men fought in the war effort. The program was so popular that people protested in the streets to keep it even after the war ended, according to Leonard. But the program was dismantled after political disputes over how to run the program, as southern states demanded that the daycares be segregated.In 1971, Congress passed the Comprehensive Child Development Act, which would have created a national system of federally subsidized daycare centers. Inflamed by the idea that the bill would encourage women to work outside the home, church groups organized letter-writing campaigns against the bill. Rightwing pundits, meanwhile, claimed the bill was “a plan to Sovietize our youth”. Richard Nixon ultimately vetoed the bill, calling it “the most radical piece of legislation” to ever cross his desk.Today, Leonard writes, corporations have an entrenched interest in keeping childcare from becoming a public good in the US. Private equity is heavily invested in childcare companies. Wealthy corporations, especially big tech companies, can also use their generous paid leave policies to lure in the best talent.“I talked to a congressman who was telling me he was trying to get some of these companies on board to back a national paid leave policy, and they were saying: ‘We don’t want to do paid leave because then we give up our own competitive advantage.’ It’s so cynical,” Leonard said. “These are companies that have been able to create this image around themselves of being feminist and pro-family. Like: ‘They’re great places to work for women. They help fund fertility treatments!’”She continued: “They’ve feminist-washed themselves. They’re working against a national policy that would benefit everyone and that ultimately would benefit our democracy, because you wouldn’t have this huge inequality of benefits and lifestyles.”‘A grind’The US has become far more accepting of women’s careerist ambitions over the last 50 years – especially as it has become more difficult for US families to sustain themselves on a single income – but balancing work and family life is still often treated as a matter of personal responsibility (or, frequently, as a personal failing).View image in fullscreenTo improve mothers’ lives, Leonard found, a commitment to flexible gender norms – in the home and at work – must be coupled with a robust social safety net.Each of the women in Four Mothers struggled with male partners who, in various ways and for assorted reasons, failed to provide as much childcare as the mothers. Sarah, a teacher in Utah, was married to an Amazon delivery driver who got zero parental leave. Sarah was entitled to three months of leave, at partial pay, but only because her union advocated for it. Although Sarah and her husband chose to leave the Mormon church, she found herself longing for the community that the church provided because it offered some form of support and acknowledgment of motherhood.Finland perhaps fares the best in Leonard’s book. The country, which gives parents about a year of paid leave, invests heavily in its maternal care system and has some of the lowest infant and maternal mortality rates in the world; it even offers mothers prenatal counseling where they can discuss their own childhoods and how to break cycles of intergenerational trauma. (The US, by contrast, has the highest maternal mortality rate of any wealthy country.) Finland is also the only industrialized nation on the planet where fathers spend more time with their children than mothers do. (The difference is about eight minutes, “about as even as it can be”, Leonard wrote in Four Mothers.) Parents are also happier than non-parents in Finland – which is routinely ranked as the happiest country in the world – while the inverse is true in the US.View image in fullscreenStill, the birth rate is on the decline in Finland, just as it is in Japan and the US. It is not clear what kinds of pronatalist policies, if any, induce people to have kids. Nearly 60% of Americans under 50 who say they are unlikely to have children say that’s because “they just don’t want to”.“The pronatal argument here – that’s really focused on people who make the choice not to have children. That is not only cruel and mean, but it’s also ineffective, because people who don’t want to have kids probably aren’t going to have kids and none of this stuff is going to make a difference,” Leonard said.That said, had she been building her family in the US rather than Japan, Leonard doesn’t know if she would have had three children. Given the cost of US childcare, “it would have been more of a grind”.“I just think it’s harder and more expensive here. So it was somewhat easier to have that third child there,” Leonard said. “It’s not because they gave me a $5,000 baby bonus.” More

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      Finland Lets Eagle S Tanker Depart to International Waters

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      The Finnish authorities suggested that the ship, which was seized on suspicion of involvement in the cutting of undersea cables, had ties to Russia.The Finnish authorities said on Sunday that they had released an oil tanker seized in December over suspicions that it had deliberately cut vital undersea cables but that a criminal investigation into the episode would continue.The authorities said last year that the ship, the Eagle S, appeared to belong to Russia’s shadow fleet — older tankers that covertly transport Russian crude oil around the world — escalating concerns about a covert campaign to sabotage European infrastructure.On Sunday, the Finnish police said that since the criminal inquiry “has progressed,” the aging tanker was free to leave and that border officials had escorted the ship out of the country’s territorial waters.Petteri Orpo, Finland’s prime minister, said in an interview with Yle, the country’s public broadcaster, that “the criminal process and investigation will continue.”Investigators were still examining materials gathered after an onboard “forensic investigation” and would continue to interview the crew, according to the police.Eight crew members are suspected of criminal offenses, including aggravated criminal mischief and aggravated interference with communications, the police said in a statement. Five were allowed to leave Finland last week, while the other three were still barred from leaving, according to the statement.The police said the authorities hoped to conclude the investigation by the end of April.The cutting of the cables under the Baltic Sea in late December came on the heels of a series of similar incidents and prompted NATO to bolster security in the region. In January, the Swedish authorities also seized a ship and said they suspected “gross sabotage” after a different undersea cable was damaged. Last month, the European Union vowed to increase security after another cable break.The Eagle S, registered in the Cook Islands in the South Pacific, had been sailing from St. Petersburg, Russia, to Port Said, Egypt, when it was seized.Western officials have long feared that Moscow’s so-called shadow fleet could be used to circumvent sanctions imposed over the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The episodes of severed cables raised worries that the shadow fleet might also be used for sabotage.The Kremlin has denied involvement in sabotage, and Russian officials have condemned the seizure of the Eagle S. More

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      in Elections

      Yrjo Kukkapuro, Who Made the Easiest of Easy Chairs, Dies at 91

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      A celebrated Finnish modernist, he designed a variety of furnishings but was best known for his seating — which, his company said, “almost every Finn has sat on.”Yrjo Kukkapuro, a Finnish furniture designer who devoted his restless creative energies to sedentary comfort, creating dozens of chairs that coddled sitters and lent a zesty flair to their surroundings, died on Feb. 8 at his home in Kauniainen, Finland. He was 91.His death was confirmed by his daughter, Isa Kukkapuro-Enbom.In his seven-decade career, Mr. Kukkapuro designed a variety of furnishings for homes, offices and public institutions. But he was best known for his seating.“Almost every Finn has sat on a chair he designed — at a metro station, in a bank, at a school or in a library,” his company, Studio Kukkapuro, said in a news release.An experimental modernist who was invigorated by the availability of lightweight synthetic materials after World War II, Mr. Kukkapuro made abundant use of fiberglass and other plastics, which could be sculpted to the human form. He also favored organic materials like steam-bent plywood and leather.Referring to Mr. Kukkapuro’s relentless pursuit of ergonomics, Jukka Savolainen, a former director of the Design Museum in Helsinki who now heads the Alvar Aalto Museum in Finland, described him as “playful with form and color, but always thinking about the user at the center.”Among Mr. Kukkapuro’s most celebrated designs was Karuselli, a slick fiberglass lounge chair with exuberant leather upholstery rolling over the edges. He attached the bulbous bucket seat to the flowerlike base with a steel bracket that permitted the chair — whose name means “carousel” in Finnish — to both swivel and rock.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      E.U. Vessels Surround Anchored Chinese Ship After Cables Are Severed in Baltic Sea

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      Multiple countries are investigating and the authorities in Europe say they have not ruled out sabotage. But U.S. intelligence officials have assessed that the cables were not cut deliberately.For more than a week, a Chinese commercial ship has apparently been forced to anchor in the Baltic Sea, surrounded and monitored by naval and coast guard vessels from European countries as the authorities attempt to unravel a maritime mystery.The development arose after two undersea fiber-optic cables were severed under the sea, and investigators from a task force that includes Finland, Sweden and Lithuania are trying to determine if the ship’s crew intentionally cut the cables by dragging the ship’s anchor along the sea floor.On Wednesday, the Swedish police announced that the inquiry into the episode had concluded but that an investigation was ongoing. Sweden did not release any initial findings.American intelligence officials had assessed that the cables were not cut deliberately, though the authorities in Europe say they have not been able to rule out sabotage.“The preliminary investigation was initiated because it cannot be ruled out that the cables were deliberately damaged,” Per Engström, the superintendent of the Swedish police, said in a statement on Wednesday. “The current classification of the crime is sabotage, though this may change.”Denmark has said it is in “ongoing dialogue” with various countries, including China.The mystery of the severed cable and who is to blame comes as Europe is increasingly on edge after a number of apparent sabotage operations, including arson attacks, vandalism and physical assaults. Many of these have been attributed to Russian intelligence operatives, including a plot that emerged last month, Western officials say, to put incendiary devices on cargo planes.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Severing of Baltic Sea Cables Was ‘Sabotage,’ Germany Says

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      Germany’s defense minister said damage to two fiber-optic cables on the sea floor appeared deliberate, but a culprit was not known.Germany’s defense minister on Tuesday called the severing of two fiber-optic cables in the Baltic Sea an act of sabotage aimed at European countries that are supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia.One undersea cable connecting Finland and Germany was cut on Monday and the other, which runs between Lithuania and Sweden, was severed late Sunday. The damage disrupted some data transfers but did not endanger the internet connection or security of any of the countries, authorities said.“Nobody believes that these cables were severed by accident,” Germany’s minister of defense, Boris Pistorius, told reporters ahead of a meeting of European security officials in Brussels.He did not believe that either of the cables could have been damaged by ships accidentally dropping their anchors. “Therefore we must state — without concrete knowledge of who was responsible — that this was a hybrid action,” he said. “And we must assume, without being certain, that this was sabotage.”Concerns have been rising in Europe that Russia may wage a hybrid war against it in retaliation for helping Ukraine defend itself since a full-scale invasion began in February 2022. Russian ships have been reported in the Baltic and North Seas near areas where critical infrastructure lies beneath the waters.The foreign ministries of Finland and Germany issued a joint statement late Monday expressing concern about the severed cable between their countries.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Finnish Right-Wing Party Leader Apologizes After Racist Posts Surface

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      Riikka Purra, who leads the nationalist Finns party, was the second member of her faction to come under fire for offensive comments since the government was formed a month ago.Finland’s deputy prime minister apologized on Tuesday for “stupid social media comments” after a series of racist and sometimes violent remarks posted in 2008 surfaced in the Finnish press — the latest scandal for the party she leads, the right-wing Finns, since it joined the country’s governing coalition less than a month ago.Though the deputy prime minister, Riikka Purra, did not say the posts, published under the user name “riikka,” were hers, she said in a Twitter thread, “I apologize for my stupid social media comments 15 years ago and for the harm and resentment that they understandably caused. I’m not a perfect person, I’ve made mistakes.”According to local news media reports, in posts on a right-wing blog in 2008, “riikka” repeatedly used a racist Finnish slur against Black people, described Turkish people in derogatory terms and asked if there were any like-minded people in the city on a particular day to beat Black children. The blog was hosted by the former Finns party leader Jussi Halla-aho, who was fined by Finland’s highest court for racist incitement in 2012. The comments attributed to “riikka” are not currently on the blog. The Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat tracked Ms. Purra’s whereabouts in one instance and linked it to a post from that location.Ms. Purra did acknowledge on Tuesday that she had posted on the blog “in ways and with words that today I absolutely do not accept and would not use,” though she did not identify specific posts.Her apology came as Finland’s president, Sauli Niinistö, was attending the country’s first NATO meeting as a full member of the alliance. In reference to the incident at home, Mr. Niinistö urged the governing coalition to adopt a “clear zero-tolerance position to racism,” although he added that racial prejudice was different than opposing immigration.In Finland’s recent elections, Ms. Purra’s Eurosceptic, anti-immigration party took 46 seats in the country’s 200-strong Parliament, the faction’s strongest-ever showing. Last month, Finns joined a four-party ruling coalition and picked up seven cabinet positions under Prime Minister Petteri Orpo of the National Coalition Party.Mr. Orpo thanked Ms. Purra for “making the right decision” and gave no indication that she would be forced to resign. “The government will not fall because of this,” Mr. Orpo said.“The government has jointly committed to the principles of nondiscrimination and equality,” Mr. Orpo wrote on Twitter. “Everyone in Finland must feel that they are safe.”Johanna Vuorelma, a researcher at the University of Helsinki, said the recurring scandals had weakened Mr. Orpo’s coalition, although it was not in imminent danger of collapse. Mr. Orpo’s alliance unseated the former prime minister, Sanna Marin, who now leads the country’s opposition. She wrote on Twitter, “Nothing that has come up about the party over the last few weeks has been new or surprising,” and called on the government to “directly and unequivocally renounce racism, hate speech and violence.”Ms. Purra is not the first Finns member to have the past catch up with her.Vilhelm Junnila, another Finns minister, resigned last month after reports in the Finnish news media of his far-right sympathies, which included him joking about a Finns candidate’s electoral number, 88, a well-known neo-Nazi code for “Heil Hitler.” More

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      Finland Shifts Right With Coalition Including an Anti-Immigration Party

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      When the party of the country’s political rock star, former Prime Minister Sanna Marin, lost in April, a center-right party’s power rose.Finland’s main conservative party announced a new coalition government on Friday after weeks of negotiations, in a deal that moves the country firmly to the right and follows a pattern of similar political shifts elsewhere in Europe.Petteri Orpo, leader of the center-right National Coalition Party, would become prime minister under the coalition, which includes the right-wing nationalist Finns Party.“Finland needs change,” Mr. Orpo said at a news conference on Friday. “Our prosperity is hanging in the balance.”Assuming the coalition is approved when lawmakers vote on the prime minister in Parliament, probably next week, it will leave in opposition the more liberal Social Democratic Party led by the former prime minister Sanna Marin, who became a political rock star during her tenure. The new government is expected to introduce an era of financial belt-tightening and stricter immigration policies.Who won Finland’s election?A National Coalition Party election event in Helsinki in April. The party claimed a narrow win in the voting.Alessandro Rampazzo/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesDespite popular support for Ms. Marin’s handling of issues such as the war in Ukraine and Finland’s joining NATO, the election in April largely hinged on economic concerns like high inflation and rising public debt. Right-leaning parties made gains by focusing on worries about the country’s financial situation and by calling previous migration policies too permissive. They also criticized high spending on the welfare system.The National Coalition Party, led by Mr. Orpo, promoted a conservative economic agenda, including cuts to some housing allowances and unemployment benefits, and claimed a narrow victory, with 20.8 percent of the vote. The Finns Party came second, at 20.0 percent, campaigning on pledges to cut immigration, reduce financial contributions to the European Union and slow down action on climate change. The Social Democrats were third, with 19.9 percent, underlining the closeness of the vote.Other European countries have tacked to the right in recent years, including Italy, which is governed by a coalition under Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, leader of a party with post-Fascist roots; Sweden, which in September swapped a center-left government for a right-wing bloc; and Spain, which will hold a snap national election next month after the Socialist Workers’ Party of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez was thumped in regional and local elections.Who is in the coalition?Representatives of the coalition parties, from left: Anna-Maja Henriksson of the Swedish People’s Party, Mr. Orpo, Riikka Purra of the Finns Party and Sari Essayah of the Christian Democrats.Heikki Saukkomaa/Lehtikuva, via Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAfter no party reached a majority in Parliament, National Coalition Party leaders began efforts to form a government in talks that would stretch for weeks. Mr. Orpo said the negotiations lasted so long because the potential coalition partners were trying to decide where to make onerous spending cuts and how to increase revenue. Mr. Orpo ultimately struck a deal with the Finns, but also with two other smaller parties which got about 4 percent of the vote each.One is the Swedish People’s Party, which aims to represent Finland’s minority Swedish-speaking population. The party, which is centrist, pro-European and socially liberal, was also part of Ms. Marin’s government.The other party in the coalition is the Christian Democrats, a center-right group.On Thursday, representatives of the parties gave a joint news conference to announce that they had reached consensus on a government program.“We have been able to find accord under heavy pressure,” Mr. Orpo said. “What unites us is that we want to fix Finland.”What is the coalition likely to change?Helsinki, the capital of Finland, last year. The election in April largely hinged on economic concerns.Juho Kuva for The New York TimesThe new coalition plans to bring down the debt level by implementing measures such as cutting subsidies, according to the program.Direct cuts to public spending would amount to €4 billion, or $4.37 billion, Mr. Orpo said at the news conference on Friday.“This is not easy,” he added. “We have to make cuts where it feels bad.”The coalition also vowed to halve the number of refugees that Finland accepts every year, to 500, from about 1,000, and in general to take a harder stance on immigration.The coalition also committed to keep Finland’s military spending in line with NATO’s goal of at least 2 percent of gross domestic product and to promote membership in the alliance for both Sweden and Ukraine. Some formal steps still need to be taken before the new government is installed, but Jenni Karimaki, a political scientist at the University of Helsinki, said that, with the details already ironed out by the parties in the coalition, she did not expect any last-minute changes.Who will be the next prime minister?Mr. Orpo campaigning in Vantaa, Finland, in April. “Finland needs change,” he said at a news conference on Friday. “Our prosperity is hanging in the balance.”Antti Aimo-Koivisto/Lehtikuva, via ReutersMr. Orpo, 53, has already served in past administrations as finance minister and deputy prime minister and has held several other ministerial roles. He is now poised to take the top job.Known for being a compromiser and a negotiator and for having an austere approach to public finances, Mr. Orpo’s style contrasts with that of his predecessor.“Finland’s prosperity cannot be based on debt,” he said on Friday.Ms. Marin, 37, gained a global profile for her defense of Ukraine and for her off-duty activities, too, having been caught on private videos partying with her friends, creating some debate within Finland about the appropriateness of her behavior. More