YEARS AGO, in the wake of Zoe Baird’s confirmation hearings–in which our would-be attorney general was disqualified for failing to report her nanny’s income–Gary Trudeau did a series of “Doonesbury” strips that pointed up the absurdity of such scandal-hunting. In the most outre of them, his liberal dowager Lacey Davenport, up for confirmation in a minor post, had passed all her vetting when someone brought up her frequent-flier miles: Had she declared them as income?
Like most things that will never happen, this one has. In Germany, a half-dozen of the country’s most prominent politicians have had to resign over what is being called the Bonusmeilen-Affaere. Politicians in Germany who fly a lot have tended to use the miles they accumulate for personal trips and vacation. Since 1997, it has been the law that they’re supposed to transfer these miles to some central government office for redemption, but it’s not a law to which anyone has paid particular attention.
But national elections are coming up on September 22. And Das Bild, the biggest-selling paper in the country–a real Headless-Corpse-in-Topless-Bar! kind of rag, which usually focuses on the love lives of celebrities like Boris Becker and Claudia Schiffer–has raised a stink. Das Bild claims to have a complete list of politicians who have misused their miles. Gregor Gysi, the charismatic neo-Communist who is Berlin’s deputy mayor, was among the first to be named. Five of his flights were to Cuba. He resigned.
Cem Oezdemir, the country’s most prominent politician of Turkish descent, and a spokesman for the Green party, was also accused early. He too resigned, and announced he would not run again. His fellow Green, Juergen Trittin, leader of the party’s hardline faction, has been accused of using his own miles to take vacations in Italy. Trittin is sticking it out, and claims his miles problem is all a big misunderstanding.
The Bonus Miles affair is an absurd overreaction, and it will cost Germany some of its most gifted politicians. And it is ironic that German national politicians will pay the price for a climate of distrust that owes more to the politics of the European Union (EU) than to the politics of Germany. (The Germany style of corruption, as the Kohl-era party-financing scandals showed us, tends more towards bribing parties outright.) Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that frequent-flier miles are a bigger deal to European voters–particularly since the advent of the EU. Living under a governmental entity designed to be opaque has left Germans feeling fleeced in ways they can’t spell out.
Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
