IMF Chief a "Gluttonous Womanizer"

Will the Strauss-Kahn affair bring the French and the Americans closer together? In other words, the libertines who up until now did not take offense at their leaders’ philandering, and the ultra-puritans for whom a simple extramarital affair is enough to dismiss a politician? It would be a great opportunity.

Already in 2008, Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK) achieved a mean feat by convincing the Americans that his extramarital affair with a subordinate would not prevent him from being an excellent IMF manager. Brandishing the new “Sofitel affair,” the Americans in return now seem to expect the French to inspect the bed sheets of their politicians with a little more attention, especially when the latter are bound for export.

French politicians had difficulty “faking genuine surprise” upon learning the news of DSK’s misadventure, notes Philip Gourevitch with humor in a well-observed post on one of The New Yorker’s blogs. “DSK has long had a reputation as a gluttonous womanizer and shamelessly conspicuous consumer in Paris,” this blogger reminds us. “If he had done in France what he stands accused of doing in New York, it would likely have been kept much quieter, and not be the lead story all over the world,” says Gourevitch, who, of course, brings up Polanski, our last big Franco-American libido case. “This is a country, after all, that welcomed Roman Polanski when he fled after pleading guilty to the statutory rape of a child in California — and it was from Paris that the campaign to defend his escape was mounted most vigorously last year.”

On exactly the same theme, a blogger from The Wall Street Journal makes a lot of din: “The French media […] [have] often been accused of consciously ignoring the personal lives of France’s political elite. Whatever the facts, at the very least the French press and French voters no longer have the choice of turning a blind eye,” concluded this other blogger. Really? An initial response can be found in the 10 pages that [French newspaper] Libération devoted this morning to our “gluttonous womanizer.”