Grupo La Colina

Damned

The Economist

ON SATURDAY morning Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the IMF, was contemplating five years in the Elysée palace as France’s next president. By Monday he was locked up in a cell in Rikers Island jail in New York on suicide-watch, charged with sexual assault, unlawful imprisonment and attempted rape. If he is convicted on the most serious charges, he faces as many as five presidential terms in prison.

So steep has been Mr Strauss-Kahn’s fall, and seemingly so self-destructive, that most French people seem to think he is the victim of a plot (see article). Mr Strauss-Kahn has indeed protested that he did not try to force sex on a hotel maid and, plainly, it is for the courts to judge him. Yet this would not be the first time that a dominant man, blinded by the habit of abuse and the arrogance of power, had thrown it all away and ruined the people unfortunate enough to cross his path.

Whether or not the New York prosecutor is right to think Mr Strauss-Kahn guilty, his professional life has now come to an end. Protesting his innocence, he has already resigned from the IMF, which now needs a new head; and France will have to rethink the presidential campaign that is at hand. Both choices will affect millions of lives; and both could go very wrong.

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Whatever his personal failings, Mr Strauss-Kahn was an outstanding head of the IMF. Before the financial crisis, the fund risked irrelevance. With him there, it has again played a central part in managing the world economy. Mr Strauss-Kahn combined technical skills with shrewd political instincts. His job is being temporarily filled by his American deputy, John Lipsky, but the shareholders need to decide quickly on a formal replacement. The Europeans, beset by difficulties in the euro zone, are desperate that the job should once again go to one of them. Recently, emerging economies in particular have demanded a more open succession. They are right.

Meanwhile, Mr Strauss-Kahn’s arrest has in effect disqualified from the presidential race the politician who looked best placed to win the presidency for the Socialist Party, for the first time since François Mitterrand’s re-election in 1988. Mr Strauss-Kahn was the candidate with the greatest chance of bringing the Palaeolithic French Socialists into the modern age.

The danger now, as Socialist alternatives line up, is that the party sloughs off its modernising aspirations and reverts to type. Unlike parties of the left in Britain or Germany, France’s Socialists have yet to digest the sour reality that wealth needs to be created before it can be distributed. Their draft manifesto includes a jaw-dropping pledge to reverse France’s minimum retirement age, which has only just been raised from 60 years to 62. The Socialists’ reflex is to tell the French that they need to be “protected” and “sheltered”. However, the French cannot for ever defy the laws of economics and protect themselves with costly benefits that only pile up huge public debts for future generations. France’s tragedy is that Mr Strauss-Kahn, who understood that, misunderstood so much else.

Why this time the sex matters

Somehow Mr Strauss-Kahn sailed through a lifetime of womanising. At the IMF he had a liaison with a more junior colleague in 2008. It was his only publicly investigated affair and an inquiry, by outside lawyers, concluded that the relationship was consensual. Yet the woman in question said that Mr Strauss-Kahn was “a man with a problem that may make him ill-equipped to lead an institution where women work under his command”. That warning now seems prescient.

Many of the other, unpublicised affairs were in France, which faces questions of its own. It can be hard with public figures to trace a clear line between what is in the public interest and what should remain behind the bedroom door. In general France’s determination to respect that difference is admirable. A consensual affair between adults is usually private, barring obvious hypocrisy or some genuine public interest (such as national security). By contrast, attempted rape, or sexual violence, is a public crime. That sounds a straightforward line for a civilised country, and civilised press, to draw. Yet, in everyday political life, where affairs between powerful public figures and relatively powerless subordinates are uncomfortably common, and favours and threats exchanged between the sheets, that line is crossed too often. Accusations of sexual violence, which stack one person’s word against another, are always hard for the victim to make. The worry is that the balance in France leans against public disclosure to such an extent that few victims of harassment by powerful figures dare speak out.

So this is one of those rare cases where a sex trial could change social norms in a good way: indeed, it may already have done so. But none of that should detract from the fact that Mr Strauss Kahn deserves a fair trial—and so do the ideas he stood for. They could change France as well.