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Rent boy scandal: Sarko pays for Carla’s influence
As demands grow for the President to sack Mitterrand, fingers point at Bruni
French president Nicolas Sarkozy is paying the price for allowing his young wife, Carla Bruni, too much influence at the Elysee Palace, some French political observers believe. His popularity has fallen five points to 41 per cent as the French public have reacted badly to culture minister Frederic Mitterrand's confession that he visited rent boys on trips to Bangkok.
Mitterrand, who is openly gay, actually admitted to his Thai adventures in a memoir published four years ago, but which his enemies have brought it up again following the public outrage at the Roman Polanski affair. In Bordeaux yesterday to open an art fair, Mitterrand was heckled by right-wing protestors carrying posters urging him to "Resign!" and "Don't touch our children!".
On Saturday it was revealed that Mitterrand had not only rushed to defend Polanski, battling extradition to the States, but that he had offered to help rehabilitate two teenage brothers convicted earlier this year of raping a 16-year-old girl on the island of La Reunion in the Indian Ocean. One of the boys was the son of a former TV colleague.
Carla Bruni is in the firing line because it was she who persuaded her husband to give Mitterrand, a non-politician, the job of culture minister. And now she is assumed to be the one persuading Sarkozy to stick by him, despite the political cost.
"She has great power and influence," said Joelle Garriaud-Maylam, a senior member of Sarkozy's centre-right UMP party. "It's obvious she is defending Mitterrand. But it puts the president in a difficult situation. He is offending many of his supporters."
Sarkozy has not actually spoken publicly about Mitterrand's situation, but Mitterrand has claimed he met the president privately on Thursday and Sarkozy "confirmed his confidence" in him.
Mitterrand, nephew of the socialist president Francois Mitterrand, is one of a number of left-wingers invited into the Sarkozy government with Carla's help, in an effort to unsettle the Socialists. Mitterrand's could be the last such 'transfer' for a while. ·
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If Sarkozi is allowing the unelected Carla Bruni to tell him what's what, then it is the sign of a weak and indecisive man. Collecting 'reds' for Cabinet positions to garner or maintain popularity is also a sign of a weak man, who is more concerned with what the equally unelected media thinks, as opposed to making his own mind up the way a real leader should. What a wimp!
Mon question - porquoi? Are not all French politicians mere rent boys renting out more rent boys? Le Francais are so used to corruption that the whiff of a bit more out merely to require the response - "Ahh - je t'aime le whiff d'corruption a la dejeuner" The EU keeps their farmers in clover with the corrupt subsidies of the ever-ludicrous Common Agricultural Policy, the French contribute generously to the EU funds, and get 99% of it back in back-handers, "mais appropriatement tu dit!" Zut.