| Skybird |
08-21-22 08:56 AM |
FOCUS hits the Bull's Eye:
The photo of Sanna Marin in cut-off blue jeans, white T-shirt and the now cult black leather jacket from a rock festival in Finland went around the world. The headlines turned out in her favor - proclaiming her the "coolest head of government in the world." The Finns were proud of their prime minister, who was popular all over the world.
It was not an unwanted photo, not a paparazzo picture, shot from a bush. No photographer needed to ambush Marin, she looks confidently into the camera, the picture was: image PR. Which certainly can't be said of the video that subsequently put the Finn in the headlines in a negative light.
Marin lasciviously dancing at a private party. This video also went around the world, but now no one wrote that she was the coolest head of government in the world. Now people were asking: is she allowed to do that?
First: the photo was published against Marin's will, no doubt a mess. Marin now definitely knows who of the people around her is NOT her boyfriend. However, this video was not shot against Marin's will, you can see it clearly - she is flirting with the camera, and that: because she likes it. Today she knows it was a flirtation with a traitor.
Marin now knows even more: it was a mistake. Her mistake. "These are private pictures that were not meant for the public," Marin commented on the video to the Iltalehti newspaper. "I am sad that they have been published." She had trusted that they would not be leaked. But, "I have nothing to hide and I have done nothing illegal."
What exactly was Marin's mistake? Every head of government is entitled to privacy, even though he or she is basically on duty 24 hours a day. Still, no head of government has to abstain from alcohol; neither did Angela Merkel, who likes to drink red wine. The Finnish conservatives would have done better to save their puritanically interwoven accusations - they are hypocritical.
The accusation that Finland's social democratic prime minister has made herself open to blackmail on behalf of the Russians is also bordering on stupidity. You can't blackmail anyone with a video that the whole world has seen. Marin would only have made herself blackmailable if this video had ended up unpublished on dark paths, as a "compromat", in the hands of the Russian secret service. The latter could have threatened Marin with publication in the event that it led Finland into NATO. But that is not what happened.
What exactly is Marin's mistake? Marin's mistake is that she put herself in the spotlight. She had to publicly declare that she did not take drugs, and she was not spared a drug test. And it wasn't the opposition that demanded it - something that would have been expected - but Marin's own coalition partner. An embarrassment that Marin could have spared herself had she not been so trusting.
One can certainly lament it, but the fact is that in politics everything private is political. Politicians are public people; they produce images almost constantly that end up in the public domain - even against their will and to their sometimes drastic detriment. Think of the images of CDU chancellor candidate Armin Laschet laughing during the flood disaster on the Ahr River.
Yes, a politician is allowed to dance. And celebrate. And drink alcohol, too. But she has to know that she produces images of herself that she can't get rid of. That's the downside of vanity media like Instagram: Impending loss of control, as a result of a misjudgment.
Anyone who surfs such public hype as Sanna Marin can easily fall into the belief that she can get away with just about anything. That is the vanity trap. If you fall into it, mistakes like this happen.
For many young people, not only in her country, Sanna Marin has become a role model - an example that governing can also be cool. But it has also become clear once again where the limits lie.
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So apparently a private contact who abused Marin's trust. But as the saying goes: trust is nice - control is better.
Top assume it were a Russian plot to make her vulnerable for blackmailing, indeed is a stupid theory. If the Russians "convinced" somebody to release the video, then it was not for that purpose, but to stir up and distract Finish inner politics and so add to destablizing efforts that they aim at practially every Western nation, principally and since decades.
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