PM's lovers spark media frenzy
2007-02-28 12:48
Helsinki - Finding love on the internet, breaking up by text message, revelations of a former partner: the private life of Finland's prime minister has proved a goldmine for the country's tabloid press, drawing condemnation from the Finnish leader.
Media coverage of Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen, whose government faces general elections on March 18, has prompted the usually reserved leader and former journalist to liken Finland's Iltalehti and Ilta-Sanomat tabloid newspapers to East Germany's secret police.
"We don't want any fundamentalism in Finland, or a commercial form of the Stasi," Vanhanen wrote in a book published ahead of the country's January 2006 presidential election.
"Inside the media there are very different practices. It's usually a mix between business and journalism. But in one part of the media its only business," the centrist leader said in an interview with AFP.
Vanhanen, divorced in 2005 from his air hostess wife, is a father of two and has been in the glare of Finland's media spotlight since becoming prime minister in 2003.
The mild mannered Vanhanen says he likes nothing more than chopping wood and spending time on home improvement tasks.
Divorce, affair, internet dating
He was unprepared for the media's interest in his divorce and a rumoured affair with Tanja Karpela, a former Miss Finland and current culture minister.
Vanhanen was also stunned by coverage of his relationship with Susan Kuronen, a divorced mother of three.
The pair's meeting, in January 2006, sparked a media frenzy, the intensity of which was rare for Finland, where the media tends not to focus its attention on the private lives of politicians.
The tabloids' interest in Vanhanen's love life reached fever pitch when he revealed he had met Kuronen through an internet dating site, after having initially said they had met by chance while shopping at a furniture store.
Dumped by SMS
Nine months later the prime minister ended the relationship - by sending Kuronen a brief text message - after she had given interviews to the press against Vanhanen's explicit wishes.
"Matti left me by sending a message on my mobile phone in which he said 'it's over'," Kuronen told Me Naiset women's magazine.
In the home of Nokia, the world's leading maker of mobile phones, Vanhanen's rapid and 'high-tech' manner of breaking up was splashed across the nation's front pages.
Single again, Vanhanen currently faces more sensationalist attention over the publication of a book written by Kuronen entitled The Prime Minister's Girlfriend.
The book's publisher has however, under intense pressure, cut parts of the book relating to correspondence with Vanhanen, who was voted Finland's sexiest man in 2005 by readers of a women's magazine.