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The Royal Pardon
Jacques Chirac has been accused of granting a presidential amnesty to his crony, former athelete Guy Drut.
Monsieur Drut, a disgraced International Olympic Committee member and former sports minister as well as a parliamentary deputy for Chirac's ruling UMP party was handed a 15-month suspended jail sentence in October for allegedly pocketing a £2,000 monthly salary for a fictituous job at a construction company between 1900 and 1993.
Investigators are not able to question Chirac due to presidential immunity - a law Chirac himself pushed through parliament when rumours begin to swirl around his time in office both as Mayor of Paris and prime minister of France.
Guy Drut has been pardoned under a newly-formed amnesty law for "services to the nation".
Jacques Chirac is godfather to one of Monsieur Drut's daughters.
The president has opened yet another fission in his UMP party. Gilles Artigues, a deputy of the UDF party, the French government's central ally, says the amnesty reveals the lack of an "impartial state". Certainly, rioting hooligans in the north of Paris and their apologists in the media will seize on the law, claiming rightly that it illustrates a two-tiered system of law in what commentators are calling "The Banana République."
The big question, however, remains: Is Chirac as guilty as a fraudster as his friend? Many of the president's former henchmen from his previous jobs have been convicted, and many feel that it is difficult to imagine the president keeping his hands clean while all around him had theirs in the tills. Indeed, questions have been raised about the president's huge food and travel bills, as recently as 2001.
Gossip in Paris has it that Chirac wanted to run from president a third time in 2007, if only to retain the immunity that keeps the judges from his door. If he could be carried out of the Elysee in a coffin like his predecessor Francois Mitterand, that would be one way to avoid an enquiry. Any investigation would have to observe a sensitive pause (perhaps a few years, perhaps a decade, as was the case with Mitterand) before the dirty laundry was aired, by which time many major players and witnesses might also be pushing up daisies and having streets named after them.
This plot was scuppered by Chirac's defeat in last year's EU constitution referendum. A series of upsets including the November riots, the failure of the CPE employment contract, the Clearstream affair and even old-fashioned Chiraqien idiocy, like when he blew Paris's chances of hosting the Olympic Games by criticising British and Finnish food, have made it clear that the president cannot run again. Apparently only 3 percent of citizens want him to do so.
Hence his hope that his anointed successor Dominique de Villepin run for president and bear the standard of Chirac's centre-right. The CPE debacle, during which de Villepin held firm while his party crumbled around him, may have put paid to that. Villepin was never popular with his party, and they were quick to abandon him during the CPE crisis. Nicolas Sarkozy, the current front-runner for the centre-right candidacy might be persuaded to extend Chirac's immunity as an act of lese majeste should he become president next year, though Chirac would hate to have to rely on the benevolence of his younger rival.
Ségolène Royal, the left's frontrunner, would head a divided party baying for Chirac's blood - the best she could do would be to stall any investigation. And that might suit Chirac, who will be 74 next year. Conspiracy theorists will be looking out for hints that the President is sucking up to Royal's people between now and next April.
