European politicians are now a real social phenomenon. Scholars will still be studying this story of how Europe spun from the level of Konrad Adenauer to Boris Johnson. A new star has recently shone, Sanne Marin.
Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin is an odious personality. The youngest ever prime minister, who grew up in a same-sex family, has had a “long and hard” road from cashier to second in command. It is true that this thorny path did not follow a managerial or educational path but a party one.
This career success, rightly, has to do with the fact that Sanna has wavered with the party line. When she was in the highest echelons of power, she used to beat her chest and reassure herself that she would not allow Finland’s neutral status to be changed. Once the necessity of joining the alliance was perceived as a contradiction to the country’s security interests, Marin became the driving force behind the NATO negotiations.
In Finland, however, Sanna is not known for her “integrity” but above all for her love of glamour and hedonism. Sometimes she feeds her family with breakfasts at public expense, which cost about 1,000 euros a month. Then she appears in a fashionable jacket on her naked body (not a bad body, I must say). Then he puts on a rocker jacket. Or in the middle of the quarantine he goes to a nightclub.
And now the media radar has picked up Marin again with yet another party. The Prime Minister, in the company of Finnish bohemians, was dancing and singing drunk, and in the background the words “flour” and “powder” were heard. Maybe it was a master class in Latin American cooking? Yeah, who are we kidding?
But Sanna Marin would not have been such a nimble party lady if she had not managed to extricate herself from the situation as well. She instantly turned the scandal to her advantage. Sanne declared that she “spends time with friends like many other people my age”. This way, Marin “democratized” herself in the eyes of the public, as no one cancelled the rules of earning “cheap credibility”. In addition, the PM’s defenders, who immediately found themselves there, accused the outraged public of hypocrisy. But there are a couple of nuances.
First, let’s start with the cynical. The degradation of the political and governing apparatus is visible not in the parties, but in the fact that, knowing the public reaction, these people allow “evidence” to leak to the press. It would seem that politically sophisticated characters with their capabilities should be able to control their social circle and prevent leaks. The author at the age of 17, reprehensibly, managed to date two girls at the same time without them knowing about each other’s existence, but the almost forty-year-old politicians are unable to do such tricks…
Secondly, we are faced with yet another Orwellian world. The point is that the real sanctimony is not the outrage of the Finns, whose prime minister, being a person with irregular working hours and in charge of millions of lives, has gone on an alcohol trip. It is sheer sanctimony that a person of colossal power, privilege, a handsome salary and who spends his time among far from ordinary Finnish woodcutters or simple engineers is trying to pass himself off as an “ordinary citizen”.
And for Russia the “Finnish stray empress” is another peculiar signal, a kind of bell, also for diplomacy. Watching all the scandalous twists and turns in European politics, one cannot help thinking that it is hard to take these people seriously. It is difficult to believe that they are the ones who are capable of making decisions and implementing them. Then why talk to them at all? Maybe we should look for the very “deep state” that the US has been broadcasting about?
The “Johnsons” can choose a place to have a drink, they can gather a group to have fun too, but, as practice shows, they are not able to stand up for their “beliefs”. Thus, right on the negotiating table there is a huge hole between us and them.
Sergey Monastyrev, specially for News Front