by PERRY ANDERSON
In Germany, Gerhard Schröder’s government guaranteed a billion-euro loan to Gazprom for the building of a Baltic pipeline within a few weeks of his stepping down as chancellor and arriving on the Gazprom payroll at a salary larger than he received for governing the country. Since his departure, Angela Merkel has seen two presidents of the Republic in succession forced to resign under a cloud: Horst Köhler, a former chief of the IMF, for explaining that the Bundeswehr contingent in Afghanistan was protecting German commercial interests; and Christian Wulff, the former Christian Democrat chief in Lower Saxony, over a questionable loan for his house from a friendly businessman. Two leading ministers, one of defence, the other of education, had to go when they were stripped of their doctorates – an important credential for a political career in the Federal Republic – for intellectual theft. When the latter, Annette Schavan, an intimate of Merkel (who expressed full confidence in her), was still clinging to office, the Bild-Zeitung remarked that to have a minister for education who faked her research was like having a minister of finance with a secret bank account in Switzerland.
No sooner said, than seen. In France, the Socialist minister for the budget, plastic surgeon Jérôme Cahuzac, whose brief was to uphold fiscal probity and equity, was discovered to have somewhere between €600,000 and €15 million in hidden deposits in Switzerland and Singapore. Nicolas Sarkozy, meanwhile, stands accused by convergent witnesses of receiving some $20 million from Gaddafi for the electoral campaign that took him to the presidency. Christine Lagarde, his finance minister, who now heads the IMF, is under interrogation for her role in the award of €420 million in ‘compensation’ to Bernard Tapie, a well-known crook with a prison record, latterly a friend of Sarkozy. Nonchalant adjacency to crime is bipartisan. François Hollande, current president of the Republic, sat pillion to trysts with his mistress in the flat of a moll of a Corsican gangster killed in a shoot-out on the island last year.
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