Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens points to the apparent double standard employed by the European political elite in the Wolfowitz-Riza case:
A Tale of Two Scandals
“Full confidence” for an EU official despite a romp on a nude beach with an employee.
BY BRET STEPHENS Tuesday, April 24, 2007Imagine that a top civil servant at a major multinational institution arranges a job for a fortysomething female colleague that comes with a $45,000 raise and brings her yearly salary to about $190,000, tax free. Now imagine that the couple has been photographed at a nudist beach–him wearing nothing but a baseball cap.
The latest sordid twist in l’affaire Wolfowitz? Not at all. This is the story of Günter Verheugen, first vice president of the European Commission in Brussels. In its contrasts and similarities with the “scandal” now absorbing the World Bank and its president, it offers timely instruction on the nature and power of modern bureaucracies.
In April, Mr. Verheugen, a former German parliamentarian for the Social Democrats, appointed economist Petra Erler as his chief of staff. In August, the couple was spotted au naturel on a Baltic shore. Mr. Verheugen–who also has a wife–has dismissed allegations of impropriety as “pure slander” and asked the German newsweekly Der Spiegel whether “two adults [can’t] do as they wish in their private lives?”
In fact, they can’t: The EU Commission’s Code of Conduct, which he helped draft, observes that “in their official and private lives Commissioners should behave in a manner that is in keeping with the dignity of their office. Ruling out all risks of a conflict of interest helps guarantee their independence.”
Don’t think, however, that the commissioner is out on his ear: German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier defends him as “an irreplaceable Brussels heavyweight,” while Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso says Mr. Verheugen has his “full confidence.” That’s more support than Mr. Wolfowitz will ever get from his European friends, who are clucking noisily about the need for the World Bank to preserve its “credibility” and for its president to be “beyond reproach.” (It’s also more than he’s getting from the Bush administration, which is offering token words of support while quietly shopping former Afghan Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani as a potential successor.)
Heidi Wieczorek-Zeul, Germany’s left-wing minister for economic cooperation and development, has been on the forefront of calls for the resignation of Paul Wolfowitz. It is interesting to note Wieczorek-Zeul’s behavior in the Verheugen-Erler case. Not only did she not call for Verheugen’s resignation – on the contrary, in her role as deputy chairwoman of Germany’s social democratic party (SPD) she actively supported Verheugen, as this report proves (“SPD Leadership Supports Verheugen”).
Can we please have a listing of articles in the German media exposing Wieczorek-Zeul’s double standard? Or that of other German politicians? Google News Germany is rather mum on the subject.
Surprise, surprise…
