Jam jar politics

Some scandals are just too delicious, and those linked to French President Jacques Chirac are, well, especially juicy. As one of his rivals once said, "Chirac can have his mouth full of jam, his fingers covered with it, the pot can be standing open in front of him, and when you ask if he's a jam eater he'll say: 'Me, eat jam?'"

In other countries or cultures, that might not be acceptable behavior. But in France, there's a certain charm in cheating, and Chirac is nothing if not charming. In his re-election race against the rather humorless socialist Lionel Jospin, the reason most people give for voting for Chirac is that he's just more sympathique. It's not that evidence implicating him in several different scandals hasn't been reported. It has, extensively. But Chirac's foibles, it would seem, are ones his people find easy to understand. He epitomizes the culture from which corruption comes, and exemplifies the reasons it's so hard to eliminate. Even in grade schools, cheating is not considered a shame. And for grown-ups, as Alexis de Tocqueville wrote almost two centuries ago, while rules are stiff, in practice they're soft. So why should presidents be holier than thou?

Wouldn't it seem churlish to attack Chirac for taking his family and friends on so many lovely trips when he was mayor of Paris? Не paid €500,000 in cash for the tickets, after all. (When queried, he says he was entitled to the money from a special discretionary account.) And so what if members of his party used to draw down salaries from the government for jobs they never did? Surely they're not alone in that. Yes, yes, there were kickbacks in the construction of schools and public housing, but didn't Chirac's Gaullist Party share the wealth with the socialists and communists? Maybe a few printing invoices were padded, but what's €14 million here or there in a political system that runs on sheaves of high-denomination bills? As a former staffer at Chirac's party treasury wrote last month: "To close the cupboards you had to push in the bundles with your feet."

Nothing crystallized Chirac's rakish insouciance quite like revelations earlier this month about the food and be­verage bills he rang up from 1987 to 1995 as mayor of Paris. He and his rather snooty wife, Bernadette, apparently thought nothing of putting their champagne tastes on the municipal budget. The records were supposed to have been destroyed when he left city hall for the presidential palace but, oops, they fell into the hands of his socialist opponents: €2.13 million worth of wining and dining over eight years, not including official dinners, lunches or cocktails. Accountants perused the numbers with all the delectation of a gourmand extracting that last little sturgeon egg from a jar of beluga. The satirical-investigative weekly Canard Enchaine went into paroxysms over the imagined menu. Could Jacques and Bernadette truly have been eating €150 worth of fruit a day? Even at the opulent caterers they frequented, that's a lot of bananas. And how about those high teas? €21,000 worth of camomile, jellies and other little munchies in 1994 alone? ("Me, eat jam?")

On further examination, a lot of the bills appeared to be fake, duplicated or altered. A receipt for 5,000 francs (€762.25) worth of foie gras with truffles, for instance, seems to have had a "1" added to make it 15,000 (€2,286.75). The fact that

65 percent of the bills were paid in cash lent an especially fishy aroma to the affair. Whatever they were whipping up in that kitchen, on the books it look like slush.

Nobody's saying exactly who might have fiddled the accounts. Someone in the pantry? "If for reasons of which I'm unaware there were cases of misappropriation of funds or of dysfunctionality in the [city-hall] services," said Chirac, "then it's up to the city of Paris to bring charges." But not against him. As long as Chirac is president, he's effectively got immunity and can't be interrogated by the court. Next month he may well be elected for another five-year term. If that happens, there will still be many French breaking out the champagne. But others will be locking up their cookie jars.