Commentary: A "Clean Hands" Campaign For France?

Back in February, 1992, when an Italian Socialist Party bureaucrat was busted for taking a $3,600 bribe, no one suspected that within two years an entire generation of Italian politicians would be swept away in the turmoil of the Clean Hands anticorruption investigations. As it turned out, what began in Italy was an opening salvo in a much broader move to clean up government in post-cold war Europe. In 1996, Felipe Gonzalez and the Spanish Socialists were washed away in a torrent of sleaze. By 1999, Germany's Helmut Kohl and his Christian Democratic Union would be hobbled by revelations of illegal financing practices.

Now it's France's turn. That's why the Feb. 7 extradition of Alfred Sirven, the central figure in the country's biggest political corruption scandal in decades, is so important. True, there has been a kind of slow-drip quality to anticorruption a la francaise. Magistrates in Paris have been hard at work uncovering high-level misdeeds since at least the mid-1990s, and the list of former government ministers, mayors, and parliamentary deputies placed under judicial investigation has grown long.