Like former Prime Minister Anneli Jäätteenmäki, she was born in Lapua, Ostrobothnia, home to a right-wing nationalist movement in the early 1930s and later a Centre Party stronghold. Urpilainen ’s family soon moved to the quiet west-coast town of Kokkola, where Urpilainen grew up as the oldest of four siblings.
Her father, Kari Urpilainen, was a former schoolteacher, YLE reporter and a Social Democratic MP between 1983 and 2003. Her mother, too, was a teacher.
Urpilainen entered politics early, leading the Ostrobothnian youth branch of the SDP. At 21, she nearly joined her father on the Kokkola city council — where he still serves — but had to settle for a backup spot as a deputy member. Four years later, at the turn of the millennium, she earned a seat on the council, joining its cultural and youth committee.
Passion for music and kids
After a stint studying piano and dance locally, she earned a master’s degree in education in Jyväskylä and then studied political science at Helsinki University. She has never abandoned music though. In 2002, she recorded an album of Christmas carols. Now she plays keyboards and sings in the informal Parliamentary band and still lists music as one of her two hobbies. The other is fitness, particularly spinning.
After working as a schoolteacher in Helsinki for a year, in 2002 she moved back to Kokkola where she also taught briefly. Urpilainen also volunteered at a sports club and camp for kids, as well as in various youth organisations. Later she chaired the Finnish UN Association, the Unesco Commission and various volunteer and development aid associations. In between teaching, she spent two years as a parliamentary assistant to former Social Democratic MP Säde Tahvanainen.
In the summer of 2006 she married Juha Mustonen, who is an official at the Foreign Ministry’s Unit for General Global Affairs and its Secretariat for Nordic Cooperation. He is also secretary general of the Kokkola-based Anders Chydenius Foundation, which seeks to advance economic liberalism.
Replacing Dad as MP
In 2003, the year her father retired from Parliament, his 28-year-old daughter was elected to the legislature on her first attempt. She became the first woman to represent Central Ostrobothnia in Parliament. The following year she was re-elected to Kokkola’s city council and four years later to Parliament, becoming deputy chair of the SDP’s parliamentary delegation.
She has served on a number of committees, including finance, taxation and most recently foreign affairs.
After the powerful SDP leader Paavo Lipponen (who was premier from 1995 to 2003), the party lost popularity under the uncharismatic Eero Heinäluoma, now Speaker of Parliament. He stepped down in 2008.
That summer, Urpilainen was the youngest of nine candidates for the party leadership, eventually beating ex-SDP chair, former — and current — foreign minister Erkki Tuomioja, who was nearly twice her age. She became the first woman to lead the SDP and only one to lead the opposition besides Jäätteenmäki.
A rough start
That autumn, she got off to an unpromising start as the SDP suffered losses in local elections. Despite some occasionally cruel sniping from the tabloid press and members of her own party, though, Urpilainen persevered. The left-leaning Tuomioja criticised her attempts to position the SDP as a centrist party along the lines of Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’.
This past spring, Urpilainen silenced her critics and defied expectations of a collapse in SDP support — leading it to become the second-largest bloc in Parliament despite a slight loss of seats.
Then began the two-month on-and-off-again battle of nerves and wills to hammer out a coalition platform with the SDP’s former political foes, the conservative National Coalition Party. The former has long been close to the unions and against NATO membership while the latter is staunchly pro-business and pro-NATO, for instance.
To reinforce the SDP’s position, Urpilainen insisted that the Left Alliance also be included in the government. Together with the Greens, these may form a ‘cabinet-within-a-cabinet’ to curb the rightist tendencies of the other three parties in the coalition. First, though, Urpilainen must help manoeuvre the government to a tenable position on the next Greek bailout and put together her first state budget — no short order for someone with little experience in finance or EU affairs.
Urpilainen: No guarantees, no bailout
Urpilainen addresses the Party of European Socialists in Madrid (2009)
