Dangerous love affairs
From DSK to Kachelmann: With the media’s support, those in power abused the right to privacy. Now the dams are breaking. Op-ed by Jürg Altwegg, Geneva correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
While the most dangerous rival in the election campaign is on trial in New York: accused of raping a black chambermaid. DSK is also married to a prominent former TV journalist. It happened when she visited him at home for Europe's largest private broadcaster Tf1. Unlike most TV wives, Anne Sinclair withdrew - others have also interviewed her husband or his colleagues in the cabinet. She now stands by her husband, whose defence she is organizing, just as firmly. Le Monde has estimated the fortune of the heiress of an art dealer at "a few million euros".
Sex, money, power: DSK's arrest has plunged France into a prolonged frenzy. Nothing remains as it was, a correspondent has just reported. And he was referring to the French judiciary: Sarkozy - the most American of all presidents since the Second World War - wanted to model it more on the United States. He had to withdraw the reform - in the meantime, the French are getting daily lessons from New York. And it's like television.
And not at all superfluous. The actions of the American police against DSK were criticized in harsh tones. For days, the French elite defended their star with a class solidarity that went far beyond the presumption of innocence. Only the feminists turned the discourse around. They even proclaimed the "end of the sexual exception" - the French macho culture - with the "master's right" of politicians voluntarily granted by women. But the French still take DSK's house in New York - a monthly rent of 50,000 dollars - worse than the crime he is accused of.
DSK will also be the subject of the summer theater - next hearing: July 18. The French media no longer have any regard for the privacy of the man they celebrated as the future president. Not only in his case was their protection misused as an alibi to conceal abuses and crimes. Part of the frenzy in which the country still finds itself are the many concrete cases that are finally coming to light. The media are accusing themselves of being involved in an "omerta" by the elites.
Now the dams are breaking - and philosopher Alain Finkielkraut already fears a "totalitarianism of transparency". It would not be that difficult to define the boundaries between privacy and politics. But for the French media, it's all about a cultural revolution. After the incidents in Manhattan, they have expanded their national navel-gazing a little and discovered a case that they ignored for months: Kachelmann
