French minister criticised in ‘boy sex’ row
Both far-right and left politicians have joined in a campaign criticising Mitterrand and now risks throwing the government into a crisis.
The far-right National Front party has conceded that it went looking for dirt about Mitterrand after his impassioned defence last week of film director Roman Polanski. The director was arrested in Switzerland on US charges connected with his having sex with a 13-year-old girl in 1977 in Los Angeles.
Mr Mitterrand’s 2005 book, “La mauvaise vie” or “The Bad Life,” describes painful periods in his childhood as well as his homosexuality. One passage describes his “bad habit of paying for boys” in Thailand.
The minister said yesterday that he is not a paedophile and uses the term “boys” loosely.
In the book he wrote “I got into the habit of paying for boys,” saying his attraction to young male prostitutes was not dimmed despite knowing “the sordid details of this traffic”.
“All these rituals of the market for youths, the slave market excited me enormously... the abundance of very attractive and immediately available young boys put me in a state of desire.”
Mitterrand, whose book raised no more than literary eyebrows when published four years ago, is to go on national television to explain himself.
President Nicolas Sarkozy’s conservative UMP party is squirming, but so far holding firm in defence of Mitterrand, a nephew of former Socialist president Francois.
Mitterrand who is widely known to the French for his eloquent TV profiles of the famous, entered the government in June as part of Mr Sarkozy’s policy of reaching out to the left.
Socialist Arnaud Montebourg claimed that Mitterrand “deliberately acted in violation of national and international laws” and appealed to Mr Sarkozy and Prime Minister Francois Fillon to fire him. “It is impossible that a minister representing France can encourage violation of his own international commitments to fight sexual tourism.”
The scandal started when National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen read excerpts of Mitterrand’s book on French television and demanded his resignation. The Socialists then jumped on the bandwagon.
“To be dragged through the mud by the (National Front) is an honour,” Mitterrand said.
No one has come forth with an outright defence of the minister. However, the government stood firm in a bid to hold off the attack.
A top aide to Sarkozy, Henri Guaino, stressed that the book was written four years ago with no complaint from politicians on left or right.
“He wrote a book . . . Was he taken before a court? Was he the object of a lawsuit?” he said. Calling it a “pathetic controversy,” he asked why “such radical consequences” should be in the offing.
