More than a tinge!!
For the leading party in the perfect artificially-constructed bourgeois democracy to go through this, shows that in every country bourgeois democracy is inherently vulnerable to capitalist influence.
(Yes, yes, I know marxists have long known that already. The point however is that it has to learned by ordinary people from their own experience.)
(Tonight also the miasmas of sleaze are coiling around New Labour in London, as Geoffrey Robinson, who has done considerable favours for its core trio, Blair, Brown and Mandelson, has been denounced by his former accountant for dubious business methods.)
In Germany the most dramatic implication for the whole process of bourgeois democracy is the suggestion that large quantities of this money were paid by the socialist government of Mitterand to Kohl to help him win the 1994 election for the Christian Democrats!
No doubt the interests of Franco German unity require Kohl as a "man of honour", not to reveal such a sensationally damaging fact. The Europe of bourgeois democracy, staggering from the revelations of corruption in the Commission, looks tainted for a decade.
Other features of the ramifying CDU affair are that a major focus of the bribes was to get at the job lot capital of the old German Democratic Republic, in particular the Leuna refinery. Snouts in the trough.
Another focus is the sourcing of funds from arms manufacturers for a state that is never supposed by its constitution to go into an aggressive war.
And at its crudest the interesting possibility, admitted by Koch, the CDU president of Hesse, that millions of marks in their own secret bank accounts cannot be traced, and could indeed have been stolen, by persons unknown.
"Kohl" colloquially in German also means "money", interestingly enough.
The left in all western countries should be pushing for much tighter monitoring of the finances of political parties. It is almost an open door.
Chris Burford
London