Stupidest day in Finnish politics turns into the dumbest week
Finland continues to bask in foreign attention due to the prime minister's party scandal, with PM Sanna Marin currently ranking higher in Google Trends than Taylor Swift. It’s not all that often that Finland gets this level of attention, even for something this frivolous, so the level of attention alone is sufficient to feed the news cycle.
Developments during the week:
People, particularly Marin’s opponents, continue to microanalyze the Instagram videos of Marin dancing, finding some indications that there might, indeed, have been drug use, ie. some people can faintly be heard talking in terms that could be Finnish drug lingo and so on. There’s nothing conclusive, and the police announce that they don't suspect foul play related to videos. Marin took a drug test, but since it's an urine test and not a hair test, critics claim it proves nothing.
Marin was also accused of cheating on her husband when a video turned out where she's dancing with a guy (actually locally quite famous actor/singer Olavi Uusivirta) who, it must be admitted, is looking like he’s totally trying to get his mack on. At least as far as I've interpreted it, she's not really responding to his attempts, and appears to gently tells him to stop trying at some point. When asked about this video, Marin said that she thought Uusivirta "was trying to whisper her something", which doesn’t look like a probable explanation. A friend of mine, when we talked about the scandal, said that she probably phrased it that way since if she had said "Olavi Uusivirta was trying to lick my neck even though I said no" it would probably have been a career-ender for him, rather than her.
It turns out that two of Marin's celeb friends took a picture of themselves kissing while topless at Marin's official residence in Kesäranta, ie. Finland's Downing Street 11. This was considered to be inappropiate by many due to the official status of the location, as well as due to the idea that there might have been state secrets in the apartment. (One columnist even ridiculously compared it to the events at US congress in January 6, 2021. If you want evidence about the mental American colonization of European politics...) Marin promptly apologized.
Marin gave a tearful address in Social Democratic party meeting, saying "I am a human being. In the midst of the crisis, I have been thinking about Ukraine and about all of you". It should be noted this wasn’t just a random statement, rest of her speech was about Ukraine and shows the hardening of opinions in Finland about Russia.
There’s been metric ton of news about the scandal in foreign media (example, example, another example), and this coverage has then become a story all by itself in Finland. After all, Finland is a country of 5,5 million people and typically is hugely interested in all the cases where it is mentioned outside of its own borders, as this meme, for instance, indicates. (I've heard that New Zealanders, for instance, behave the same way). Much of the foreign coverage seems to range from "look at this hot PM" to "is this a plot by Putin" to "haha, it turns out that Finns are stuffy and conservative for hating their PM for dancing".
Meanwhile, the local discussions, in addition to scoffing at drug/cheating/topless stuff, are like: Marin formally on holiday when partying? what if the Russians had attacked while she was drunk, or if there had been a crisis equivalent to the MS Estonia ship disaster? (Russia has actually sent most of the troops in the Northwestern area to Ukraine, and Finnish crisis laws are written in a way that would nevertheless enable reacting to crises even if she had actually been in complete blackout mode.) In particular, did the PM’s parties affect the handling of the Uniper/Fortum affair, relating to the arrangements related to the bailout of a German gas-importing company with Finnish investment? Is it simply proper for Marin to party with Instagram influencers and pop stars, who are 5 to 10 years younger than 36-year-old Marin?
And, on the other hand, from another section: Is it all just media effort to get clicks and try to demonstrate they're not going easy on Marin for being young and female and leftist? Why can’t we all just appreciate a young, easygoing prime minister? Why all this attention to partying when we could be talking about climate change/the cost-of-living crisis/Ukraine/millions of other topics? Thus far, getting people to stop talk about partying by Tweeting “Why are we talking about partying when we could talk about…” has failed to work, perhaps because those tweets inevitably just become a part of the all-consuming, ever-present party discourse, as well.
Will it ever end? If there's not something new and conclusive turning up, the scandal will probably enter a waning phase, but of course it’s never guaranteed that something new and conclusive would not turn up. The Finnish media is certainly still interested in all indications that there might be something new, including one journalist claiming that there’s a video moving about in the "Thor network" showing drug use.
This turned out to be a prank. Perhaps a fitting end to this saga would be everything else turning out to be a prank as well, and Finnish politics returning to their predictable, boring grooves – not that that would be a likely option in the midst of the current global events.
Note: image is from May. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Sanna_Marin_in_2022#/media/File:P%C3%A4%C3%A4ministeri_Marin_Berliiniss%C3%A4_3.5.2022_(52047373353).jpg