The stupidest day in Finnish politics in ages

The first rule of the Flour Gang is to never talk about the Flour Gang.

Finnish PM Sanna Marin, 36, has at times been seen out and about, drinking and dancing in clubs and such. Previously, the major affair garnering foreign attention was in December, when she was out late in a Helsinki club even though she had been exposed to Covid and there were still Covid restrictions for various things; even though the restrictions didn't affect what she, specifically, was doing, this was considered to be improper. On these evenings she's been spotted with an entourage, mostly consisting of local pop stars and other celebs.

Just last week, Marin was at one of the major music festivals in Finland, Flow Festival – not the biggest festival, but a classic hipster festival and certainly "upscale", these days – and had pics taken with the attending celebs. This caused some tut-tutting about behaving immaturely during the ongoing great crises in Europe and the world. Whatever.

Now it turns out that one of the members of her entourage took a video of her being in a drunken party and posted it on IG – private account for 92 people, to be sure, but of course it’s pretty much a given something like that's going to get out. The video started spreading yesterday, and the entirety of today has consisted on Finnish social and traditional media obsessing about the clip, specifically about the specific charges of whether her entourage uses drugs, particularly cocaine.

Of course a Prime Minister partying in an entourage that's on drugs would be scandal in other countries, too, whether they themselvs took coke personally or not. Still, Finland tends to currently be particularly conservative on drugs compared to other Western countries. Even pot decriminalization is not really something that most would consider to be achievable in the short term. Usually, the hard drug of choice for Finns who do partake has been speed, but last few years, coke has been making inroads in Helsinki.

Still, none of the celebrities are actually snorting anything up in the video, so what's the evidence for drug use? Well, they're smiling and having fun and so on in the video (Finns might drink alcohol, but we do it to get drunk, not to actually have fun), at some parts of the video, some of them shout "Fuck it, this makes me feel good" in reference to something unseen. Also, some claim that some of the pixels in the video indeed make it look like there's coke on the table. (Others claim it's a phone.) One particular claim is even that people on the video must be on drugs since there are so few bottles or glasses seen.

However, another word used in the video is… well, something that might be "jauhojengi" ("flour gang") or something else. “Flour” has then been interpreted to mean cocaine, though many of those with expertise in the scene are claiming that "flour" is actually not Finnish drug lingo and that they’ve never heard the word being used to refer to powder drugs by anyone.

"Jauhojengi" instantly became a local meme, even though it's unclear whether the words "jauhojengi" are actually used - the video features people dancing to and singing washed-up pop rapper Petri Nygård's lyrics for the old hit song "Selvä päivä" ("Sober day"), which is about, as you might guess, drinking. (You can find translated lyrics here, should you really need a reference as to what sort of topics early-10s Finnish party rap might concentrate on.) The word heard as "jauho" might well instead be a reference to "jallu", or Jaloviina, an iconic Finnish booze brand that's 50 % brandy and 50 % grain spirit.

Several media outlets took the whole "flour gang" thing and ran with it, probably one reason being that earlier in the week they were criticized for going too easy on Marin and her government. Now others are attacking media for pushing a theory originally spread (at least on Twitter) by conspiracy theorist accounts that have otherwise often spread pro-Russian narratives. Yes, there are even references to whole thing being a Russian disinformation campaign. What isn’t, these days?

Marin has herself had to comment on this, saying that she is disappointed about the leak, that she only had mild drinks and doesn't use drugs and that she's willing to even take a drug test (not that it would show cocaine use anyway, more than a few days having passed from the party). Of course it still wouldn’t be too surprising if it turned out that, after all this unfocused speculation based on ridiculous things, one or more of the celeb entourage members has actually used drugs at some time. Who knows? They’re celebs.

All in all, it would probably be the best if the PM quit back on partying or at least chose better friends to avoid embarrassing stuff leaking out (also, you know, for general security reasons). Furthermore, the first rule of the Flour Gang is to never talk about the Flour Gang. (Or maybe it should be called the “Gang of Flour”?) It’s still not impossible that this might lead to resignations, which would be about the only thing still left to make this affair dumber.