The Malaysian Insider

PARIS, Nov 7 — A French joke claims that government buildings in Paris are so beautiful because their facades hide a great deal of filth.

Given the current corruption scandals in France, this seems to be true. A former prime minister is on trial for alleged complicity in a plot to besmirch the reputation of his opponents. A previous interior minister was recently sentenced to jail for receiving kickbacks. And now, it is the turn of Jacques Chirac — who served as president for more than a decade — to stand in the dock.

But it is unlikely that this wave of high profile court cases will clean up France's politics. That would require a far more aggressive government action.

Corruption, of course, is not a French invention. Earlier this year, most of Britain's parliamentarians were found to have misused their expense accounts to finance secondary homes, new furniture and even pet ducks. Meanwhile, in Italy the real surprise is when a politician turns out to be incorruptible.

But France remains unique in Europe for the sheer scope of its corruption cases, and by the fact that they invariably start small, assume huge proportions, and then just fizzle out without a decisive outcome.

Take the scandal involving Elf, the French oil giant, found to have spent hundreds of millions of euros on bribes to politicians and businessmen in the 1990s. The president of France's constitutional court went to jail, and his mistress was fined. But the majority of those bribed escaped justice.

Earlier this decade, judges discovered that an arms sale to Taiwan included secret kickbacks worth nearly 500 million euros (RM2.4 billion). A total of 10 people involved in that affair simply disappeared in mysterious circumstances. Yet all attempts to find the culprits were halted by the government — for reasons of “national security”.

In all such cases, financial malpractice, spying agencies, intricate power games and the occasional murder combined into a dazzling display worthy of a James Bond novel.

No single explanation can be given for France's repeated waves of corruption scandals. The country has a vibrant media, an independent judiciary and a well-paid, highly educated bureaucracy. In short, it has all the necessary instruments to prevent or detect corrupt activities.

But it also has a peculiar political system in which one individual exercises enormous personal power. A French president appoints tens of thousands of officials, creates and dismisses governments and exercises direct control over the military and security services.

The system was created to ensure political stability. Yet its by-product is a vast network of patronage. A president does not have to seek favours; people fall over themselves to offer their services. And, until earlier this year, ordinary Frenchmen did not even know how much the presidential machinery spent on its operations. Parliaments were too weak to inquire, and auditors were appointed by the state.

The social base of France's political elite is also too narrow. The Ecole Nationale d'Administration (ENA), France's top college was — ironically — founded in order to democratise recruitment into the civil service. But the effect has been precisely the reverse: the 90 graduates it produces every year scoop up the top positions in most walks of life. Unsurprisingly, some of these high-flyers regard themselves as being above the law.

Matters are not helped by the fluid nature of France's political parties. Every president in modern history rose to the top either by successfully fighting his own party's political machinery, or by creating an entirely new party from scratch.

This required alliances with dubious characters, and a great deal of cash. The traditional path to national prominence is to be elected as mayor of a big city, and to use the money and influence garnered in that position to walk through the gilded doors of the Elysee presidential palace.

Former President Jacques Chirac — an ENA graduate — is now charged with appointing his allies to fictitious jobs when he was mayor of Paris during the 1970s. Chirac strenuously denies the allegations and most Frenchmen — who hold him in high esteem — believe his denials. Nevertheless, the accusations strike a familiar chord in French politics.

And the advent of more adversarial, US-style politics — now requiring sophisticated media campaigns — has only aggravated the problem. Candidates need even larger sums of money than before, and in a country where large corporations are still either state-owned or dependent on government contracts, the scope for misdemeanour remains high.

Current president Nicolas Sarkozy has done a great deal to restrict the scope for corruption. Electoral campaign financing is more transparent. Most of the new ministers are not ENA graduates. And auditors are becoming more aggressive.

But Sarkozy — dubbed “president bling bling” — has also surrounded himself with a new class of the super-rich. And the President is planning to abolish France's investigating magistrates, precisely those who are at the forefront of the battle against corruption.

So the suspicion is that France's political class still has to clean up its act. The people of France have changed: they are no longer prepared to give their leaders the benefit of the doubt, or to tolerate their cosy links with businessmen.

Former President Francois Mitterrand, under whose rule corruption became almost institutionalised, is alleged to have said on his deathbed in 1995 that “future generations will not understand how we did things”.

At least on this point he was quite right. — Straits Times