President Volodymyr Zelenskiy based his election campaign – and before that, his role in his popular television show – on a crusade against corruption in the Ukrainian government. He and his associates have talked about punishing members the previous administration and corrupt oligarchs who had been too cozy with them. At his inauguration, the new president called a snap parliamentary election – to get the tainted Verkhovna Rada deputies out of office and to strengthen his hand in fighting corruption.
Based on an index compiled regularly by Transparency International, Ukraine has been getting steadily less corrupt since bottoming out in the 152nd place in 2011, under Viktor Yanukovych’s enlightened leadership. Progress under the administration of Petro Poroshenko was considerable. Still, its current 120th position out of 175 nations is not ideal and needs to be improved. This is clearly what foreign investors and European Union politicians want and why Ukrainians voted for Zelenskiy.
The new team’s ideas of tackling corruption seem to rely on punishment, dismissal and other forms of deterrent. But the best – and perhaps the only – way to defeat corruption is to create open society with strong, transparent and accountable institutions associated with Western liberal democracy.
While Zelenskiy, a former actor, fits perfectly into an anti-establishment trend that is sweeping the world, his determination to fight corruption, if genuine, will go rather against the grain of existing populist regimes. In fact, corruption seems to get worse whenever a country’s government leans toward the right.
Recently Austria’s far-right Freedom Party got embroidered in a corruption scandal. Its leader Heinz-Christian Strache had been inveigled into a meeting with a purported daughter of a Russian oligarch to whom he promised lucrative government contracts in exchange for political contributions.
This is not an exception but rather the rule. The new right-wing populism goes hand-in-glove with corruption. Viktor Orban in Hungary is notorious for enriching his cronies. Nigel Farage and the Leave campaign in Great Britain had a persistent – but never investigated – whiff of corruption hanging over them. Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel is under a corruption cloud and is very likely to get indicted. The Trump family in the United States has become notorious for self-dealing at every turn, and cabinet secretaries living high on the hog at taxpayer expense have become America’s new normal.
Austria’s Freedom Party, by the way, nearly collapsed in the early 2000s under the weight of its corruption. Ironically, it was revived by Strache who promised to clean up its act.
Not at all surprisingly, right-wing leaders are chummy among themselves even when their ideologies and religious beliefs are hostile to each other. And Russia pops up in almost every instance when high-level corruption is alleged. After all, Vladimir Putin is the sugar daddy of the international far-right populism and an unchallenged champion of kleptocracy.
Of course, the far-right doesn’t have a monopoly on corruption. The far-left is equally guilty, as Venezuela has demonstrated. The point is that all authoritarian political systems are easier to suborn since they rely on charismatic leaders rather than institutions and laws.
Putin is notorious for his personal management style, often solving ordinary callers’ problems on national TV and involving himself in a variety of piddling matters. Russians call it, sarcastically, hands-on management but the connotation here is the small car that used to be given to amputees where the gas pedal and the brake were operated by hand.
Putin personally approves high-visibility investment projects and, allegedly, demands his cut. The infamous Trump Tower Moscow supposedly included a gift of a choice penthouse apartment for the Russian president.
Hands-on management and corruption often spread downward, to lower levels. The Russian state has effectively rotted away and has been replaced by a mafia structure. In Georgia, on the other hand, former President Mykheil Saakashvili (whose Ukrainian citizenship has been recently restored by Zelenskiy) eliminated corruption in the police and other lower level institutions of government, monopolizing it at the top instead.
Authoritarian corruption has a long inglorious pedigree. For all their strident ideological fanaticism, both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were permeated by corruption. When future historians gain access to Swiss banking records, they’ll discover how much money Nazi leaders left in various secret accounts. In Soviet Russia, meanwhile, corruption was always an integral part of ideology: property was confiscated from the “exploiter classes” and Bolshevik leaders shamelessly helped themselves to it as perks of office.
On the other hand, there is a clear inverse correlation between democracy and corruption. The most democratic countries based on the index compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit also turn out to be the least corrupt. They include the Nordic states, New Zealand and Canada.
The United States under Donald Trump slipped from the Full Democracy category to Flawed Democracy. In 2018, the Land of the Free ranked a notch below Chile and Estonia and three notches below South Korea. Its corruption perception standing suffered as well: the US dropped four spots in 2018, settling marginally above Uruguay and the Emirates.
The EU ranks along with the United States as the greatest achievement of modern political thought. It offers membership to countries willing to undertake democratic reforms, build strong, independent and transparent institutions and encourage maximum openness in society. Many countries on the periphery of the European continent have been grotesquely corrupt throughout their history. Gradually, they are getting rid of corruption now that they are joining the EU.
Small wonder that authoritarian-leaning populists everywhere hate the EU. Hungary’s Viktor Orban for one finds it harder to enrich himself under the spotlight from Brussels.
Philanthropist George Soros has been attacked by the right precisely because his organization is called Open Society and it is exactly what it promotes around the world. Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu finds no problem in associating with Orban, despite rhetoric that pines away for Hungary’s interwar regime and verges on anti-Semitic. But Soros is falsely accused in Netanyahu’s Israel of collaborating with Hungarian fascists during the war.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky had his oil company stolen, but the fact that he was jailed by Putin probably had a lot to do with his Open Russia Foundation.
The public in Ukraine demands vengeance for corrupt officials and oligarchs. In Russia, too, it is a key reason why a clear majority reveres Stalin: they think that a Stalin-like figure could clean up their country’s kleptocracy by jailing and executing the thieving bureaucrats.
But without building institutions of liberal democracy, without openness, firing and punishing corrupt officials alone won’t do any good. Their replacements will be suborned just as easily as the old ones.
