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The discovering
that Helmut Kohl, Chancellor of the German reunification and the tyrannical
father of the CDU for a quarter century, had multibillionaire accounts
off the book in violation of the political parties financing law, he himself
made pass at the Bundestag few years ago, has shocked deeply the general
opinion all over Europe. The argument heard by common people is the following:
"If also the statesman, the most enduring and representative of the
continent and that has never be touched by the least suspicion of dishonesty,
uses to overindulge in these practices, it real means that that there's
no escape".
The Kohl case represents indeed the feather
that breaks the camel's back, the disconcerting end of a ten-year period
featured by the numerousness, almost without record, of financial scandals
top level. Let's start form the States. The special public prosecutor
Kenneth Starr, who has required in vain the impeachment of the president
for he had lied about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, has lead
for years surveys over some affairs the couple carried out when Bill was
still governor of the Arkansas. The enquire provoked also a high-rankling
suicide (that of the lawyer and best friend of the first lady) and by
the murders of two persons involved in the family affairs and that the
FBI has never succeeded in solving. The impression, that the system has
someway 'protected' the Clinton in order to prevent America from the trauma
of a judicial procedure against the president on charge, is still the
most sound across the Atlantic. The pending enquire over him did not nevertheless
prevent Bill Clinton to be involved in other very embarrassing story in
occasion of his last electoral campaign. It seems already stated that
the democratic party received, in violation of law, high subventions from
a business man acting for the government of Taiwan, allowing suspecting
that the president took some international engagement underhand. An unwholesome
collusion between policy and finance and an endemic corruption of the
ruling class has been one of the low-grade features of the new democratic
Japan, where as far as three Prime Ministers had to throw the sponge for
financial scandals. On the other hand avidity, corruption and robberies
have featured the policy environment of almost all the Asiatic countries,
the Philippine of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, the Indonesia of Suharto,
the Pakistan of Sharif, the Malaysia of Mahatir. All the same the situation
in Latin America, where, from Argentina to Mexico, corruption is so rooted
since ever to be an integrant part of the political context. Everybody
was aware for example that Carlos Menem, president of Argentina from the
beginning of the nineties, even with big merits in its economic recovery,
did not have an immaculate reputation and was surrounded by profiteers
and rascals that got big illegal benefits from the privatisation campaign.
That did not prevented him from obtaining, by an overwhelming victory,
a second mandate and it would not be an obstacle either for a third one,
if constitution would have permitted it. Mexicans have always beard their
presidents getting rich during the unique mandate the Constitution allows,
and some of them - as Miguel Aleman says - has entered the Palace poor
to exit multi-billionaire, as it is well known. In the last years the
moralizing crusade has bettered things a little but the fact that the
power is since ten-year periods in the hands of the same institutional
revolutionary party does not surely help to do the cleaning. If, in Brazil,
the current president of the Republic Cardoso seems above suspicion, surely
the same cannot be said for the regional governors. If then we go to see
what happens in some more little states as Ecuador, Paraguay, Colombia
or Panama, the situation is even hallucinating. It is not surely
better than in Africa, where the real democracies are counted on one's
fingers and the sack of the national resources is a deep-rooted custom
of the post-colonial ruling classes.
Mobutu, that in the quarter century governed
the Congo has accumulated personal assets up to nearly 10.000 billions,
has become a legendary case, but not better is the behaviour of his successor
Laurent Kabila. Nobody, naturally, is able to measure the personal richness
of a captain in policy as the president of the Gabon, Bongo, is, in power
since thirty years, or the little satraps that govern the countries, both
Anglophone or Francophone of the western Africa. If corruption in the
East and in the developing countries was someway expected, the proliferation
of scandals in Europe has had a disruptive effect.
The most alarming news have come from the
Russia of Eltsin, where in only eight years the connivance of the political
class, the business environment and the organized crime has turned to
a rule, and where the combination of a wild privatisation and a huge flux
of founds from the West has allowed fraudulent financial operations and
illegal enrichment of no record precedent. Even setting apart the German
case, that will deserve us still many surprises, the sore points come,
on the other hand, from Western Europe that is still deemed somewhere
in the world as a model. It is surely not the chance to remember here
the event in details, known to all and sundry, of Tangentopoli, that in
two- three years has swept away or reduced to a ghost five Italian policy
parties over which lied all the governments in the post-war - DC, PSI,
PSDI, PRI and PLI - and saving the PCI only for the Public Prosecutors
of the Red Regions refrained from using the same methods of the team of
Milan, or for the few exponents entrapped as Primo Greganti, covered at
the most the top managers even at the cost of facing personally the consequences.
From the several trials hold against the leaders of the First Republic
it has come out the ravaging means employed to finance the political struggle
and the relationship between the Palace and the economy in the seventies
and eighties. Surely there was the need to oppose the advance of a communist
party that its time was backed by illegal incomes as the financing from
Moscow, the shares from the commerce with the Soviet Empire and the contributions
of the Coop, but the spread of the system all levels, from the Central
State to the local authorities, ended to establish an explosive situation,
to which Di Pietro and colleagues limited to apply the detonator. Nowadays
there's an understandable push to review that period and to ascertain,
on a side, if all trials were carried out in full respect of law, and
on the other, which was their political charge. Anyhow it's already evident
that the "big cleanings" of the 92-94 period were thoroughly
aimed, meaning that not all the culprits for corruption, both on the political
and business side, were brought to trial. In other words they had arranged
a method that we could define the "reasoned decimation", and
for an excess of zeal by the examining magistrates or for the will to
beat some special personages it has been committed mistakes and abuses
of power. Some figures of the First republic have indeed been acquitted
later or could make a come back even if having not settled their accounts
with justice.
Anyhow Tangentopoli has produced the most
quick and radical replacement in the moderate ruling political class that
can be noticed in Europe in no revolutionary periods. If no other country
of the Union has passed trough - at least till now - a so traumatic experience,
it occurred also in France, Spain, Belgium, and Greece. The heads cut
off till now in France, both on the moderate and socialist sides are about
a hundred, and the process is going on unceasingly and involving first
rank personages as the ex Minister for Foreign Affairs Dumas, the Mayor
of Paris, Tiberi, and - lately - the Minister for the Economy Dominique
Strauss-Kahn. Many deem that, if in the French regulations public prosecutors
did not depended from the executive power, and hence they were not unavoidable
subjected to Pressures from the top, things would have gone as in Italy.
But, notwithstanding those conditioning, the stench of scandal has involved
closely the Elysée. It's already publicly acknowledged that the
dead Francois Mitterrand, during his fourteen years as President of the
Republic, often behaved as a kind of cosca leader, and that his successor
Jacques Chirac, still on charge, has managed Paris in a way all but faultless.
Till three months ago they think that Germany
was different. Now, the revelations by an old rival of Kohl, the confessions
of some close collaborators of his, and his admissions themselves before
the party direction, made us discover that it was not this way. Everything
makes us deem that the ex Chancellor did not personally cashed either
a penny, but the "secret contributions " system he created to
finance his policy was just as good as the one settle out by Bettino Craxi.
Nevertheless, Germans always find the way to distinguish themselves: basing
over the law the CDU must give back to the president of the Bundestag,
so to destine to charity, the double of the amounts illegally collected:
a dreadful hindrance for the opposition, that could act over the German
policy the same effect Tangentopoli had over the Italian one.
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Mensile di scienza medica e attualita` 
