Strauss-Kahn scandal shows up French machismo

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who is under house arrest after posting bail, resigned on Thursday as head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), saying he did so with great regret but must focus entirely on clearing his name of sexual assault charges.

The move came after escalating pressure on the IMF to chart a course through the crisis and promised to kick off a succession battle between emerging economies and Western nations that have long dominated the world body.

‘I want to protect this institution which I have served with honour and devotion, and especially — especially — I want to devote all my strength, all my time, and all my energy to proving my innocence,’ Strauss-Kahn said.

‘I deny with the greatest possible firmness all of the allegations that have been made against me.’

His short statement paid tribute to his American-born wife, journalist Anne Sinclair, who he said he loved more than anything, and spoke of his ‘infinite sadness’ at being compelled to leave a job to which he had also been devoted.

Meanwhile, the French have reacted with horror to the scandal engulfing International Monetary Fund chief Dominique StraussKahn - ‘Profoundly humiliating,’ ‘unbelievably cruel’.

But when it comes to the country’s politicians and media, the chief target of their condemnation, until now, has been the American justice system and not the alleged perpetrator.

Leading members of StraussKahn’s opposition Socialist Party, on whose ticket he had been expected to run for French president next year, lined up to express their outrage at seeing him being led from a New York police station in handcuffs.

All agreed the so-called ‘perp (perpetrator) walk’ was evidence of the barbarity of the US justice system.

‘It’s profoundly humiliating. It really upset me,’ the head of the Socialist Party, Martine Aubry, said.

For Liberation newspaper, the images of the handcuffs, and the decision of the judge to allow cameras in the courtroom at his bail hearing on Monday, recalled the kind of justice meted out in pre-French-Revolution France, where convicts ‘had to pay their crimes in public shame.’

Notably absent in this outpouring of sympathy, in which StraussKahn’s right to presumption of innocence was repeatedly emphasized, were expressions of solidarity with the alleged victim, a 32-year-old African immigrant.

‘What about presumption of victimhood,’ Michel Broue, a blogger writing on investigative news site Mediapart.fr, demanded to know.

For Broue, who doubts StraussKahn would even have been investigated had the alleged attack taken place in France, the reactions reflect the climate of complicity which French politicians have long enjoyed with respect to their ‘indiscretions.’

The French take an indulgent view when it comes to politicians’ sex lives, believing matters of the ‘bas-ventre’ (groin) should remain within the four walls of the bedroom and scoffing at countries where politicians resign over their affairs.

Late French president Francois Mitterand had a daughter with one of his mistresses — a fact widely-known in Paris but which was only revealed when Mazarine reached college age.

While StraussKahn also has the reputation of being a womanizer, and of being insistent in his approach to boot, while he was in France he could count on a proudly anti-puritanical press and strict privacy laws to keep details out of the papers.

‘An inveterate seducer? It’s an obvious fact that he never cared to dissimulate,’ his biographer Michel Taubmann wrote.

Allegations that he sexually assaulted a 31-year-old journalist during an interview in 2002, allegations which were never reported by mainstream media, rolled off him.

‘Yes, I like women. So what?’ he told Liberation at the end of April.

‘The monarchy is never far in France. In the collective subconscious, sexual harassment is still part of the prerogative of men of power,’ according to Antoine Perraud, a journalist with France Culture radio, also writing on Mediapart.

StraussKahn had been warned the US takes a much sterner view of sexual impropriety.

Le Figaro newspaper reported that before being named to the head of the IMF, his friends within the party had ‘given him a lecture’, reminding him that ‘Americans are a lot more pernickety than the French on moral matters.’

And yet, within a year of moving to Washington, he nearly lost his job at the IMF for sleeping with a subordinate.

For Liberation, the Frenchman knew he was ‘his own worst enemy.’

Whether the gravity of the allegations against him, and the embarrassment of the affair for France, will lead to increased scrutiny of politicians’ private lives is unclear.

Under President Nicolas Sarkozy and his ex-supermodel wife Carla the climate of secrecy has already begun to dissipate.

The couple’s more informal, some in France would say ‘American’, style, and the advent of technology that makes it easy to record private encounters and conversations, have helped create a greater degree of transparency.

And yet many French still less is more when it comes to details of leaders’ affairs.

‘Anglo-Saxons ...preach morality by example. Is it hypocritical? No doubt,’ L’Alsace newspaper wrote in an editorial on Tuesday, concluding: ‘We prefer cynicism, even sexism.’

Source: DPA