FIRST Agusta, now the Dassault bribery allegations. An unsolved murder. Talk of Mafia connections. Secret foreign bank accounts. Officials in jail. Ministerial resignations . .. Belgium's francophone Socialist Party (PS) members are asking when will it all end.
Others wonder at the Belgian political system's extraordinary resilience in the face of yet another crippling blow to its rock bottom credibility.
Last week the party's former auditor and financial brains, Mr Fernand Detaille, was charged with fraud, corruption and forgery, joining two other PS officials in Liege jail pending trial.
The latest arrest and the police searches on Thursday of PS head quarters arise from the discovery of four secret party accounts in Luxembourg and dubious transitions involving millions of pounds whose origins are unclear.
One of these mysterious accounts was opened on the very day in April 1989 that the party's then defence minister, Mr Guy Coeme, wrote a memo backing the bid by the French armaments group Dassault to upgrade fighter electronic defences. There is no doubt that Dassault made a secret £600,000 donation a short while later to the Socialists, but its recipients deny that it was a bribe. Corporate donations to parties were not banned until the early 1990s.
The result has been a desperate search for scapegoats in the party, with the current leader, Mr Philipe Busquin, first insisting that he knew nothing about the party's finances or any payments. "The president of the PS," he told one paper somewhat implausibly, "does not concern himself with the management or collection of party funds. These matters are dealt with by other officials".
But try as he may, the scandal seems to creep closer to Mr Busquin by the day. On Friday he admitted contacts between the party and Dassault and Agusta.
His predecessor, Mr Guy Spittaels, has been forced to stand down as president of the Walloon parliament and has seen his parliamentary immunity lifted while magistrates investigate his role in the Dassault affair. A disgraced former party official, Mr Merry Hemanus, has claimed that Mr Spitaels was aware of the payment.
Mr Detaille was previously the right hand man of Andre Cools, another former party leader who was murdered in 1991. The case is still unsolved and Cools's murky associations continue to cause the party embarrassment. One former minister last week claimed that Mr Detaille had, in a conversation with her at the time, linked the killing to the other bribes scandal involving the party, the Agusta helicopter contract.
The resulting stink of corruption is causing much agonising among the party faithful with talk of the need for a cleansing process, but it is not an easy task. In Liege last week the party regional executive voted 10 to 2 against purging from its ranks two of its members who already face charges.
Mr Busquin has set a deadline of May 1st for a thorough overhaul of the party's constitution and membership. It is a deadline which the party's partners in the centre left government coalition have also decided to use to reexamine their willingness to share power with the Socialists.
The problem is that both the Flemish Christian Democrats and the francophone Social Christians also face ongoing corruption scandals, although on a far smaller, scale, and would not cherish the prospect of having to ally themselves with the holier than thou French Liberals.
The PS's agony is exacerbated by the widespread anger at the likely closure of the Clabecq steelworks - £40 million in debt and facing desperate last ditch attempts at rescue - and the drip, drip effect of continuing revelations from the Dutroux inquiry.
