Cue the Conspiracy Theories: The Strauss-Kahn Reaction and French Democracy

[steve2470]

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2072758,00.html

This post is in partnership with Worldcrunch, a new global news site that translates stories of note in foreign languages into English. The article below was originally published in Le Monde.

There is no end to the wild talk unleashed by Dominique Strauss-Kahn's arrest by the New York police, on May 14, over charges of sexual assault, unlawful imprisonment and attempted rape. As if the extraordinary nature of this affair and the mind-blowing — and dramatic — situation in which the former head of the International Monetary Fund now finds himself could justify the most extravagant of explanations.

Ever since the news first broke on Sunday, the notion that it was all a set-up meant to bring down Strauss-Kahn has spread like wildfire, especially on the Internet. The world of imagination being boundless, each theory brought forward seems more surprising than the other: they point to the CIA or rivals inside the IMF, to big American banks or financial interests threatened by Strauss-Kahn's push for more regulation, to murky schemes by some "black cabinet" working for Nicolas Sarkozy at the Elysée palace, or even to Socialist party rivals only too eager to get rid of a dangerous candidate ahead of the 2012 presidential elections.

Conspiracy theories have been fanned by the fact that certain political figures — supporters of Strauss-Kahn, but not only — have seemed unwilling to exclude the possibility of a "trap" or of "manipulation." During an interview with the French newspaper Libération that took place on April 28, Dominique Strauss-Kahn himself had alluded to the possibility that such a set up could be organized by his enemies.