It’s the betrayal that hurts most. Democracy is a vulnerable plant, easily neglected and weakened by parasites. It has faced overt, sometimes lethal attacks in 2022 from autocrats in places as far apart as the US, Brazil, China, Russia, Iran and Turkey. Yet when democracy is silently corrupted and subverted from within – that’s the real killer.
In any international democracy league table, Europe’s parliament of 27 nations might be expected to score well. Likewise, a vice-president of that august body should surely be beyond reproach. And it may be that Eva Kaili, a Greek Socialist MEP who was sacked from her VP post and arrested last week is wrongly accused – as she maintains.
As matters stand, Kaili and several others associated with parliament face criminal charges including corruption and money laundering. Their detention followed Belgian police raids that turned up €1.5m in cash, allegedly to be used for advancing EU visa liberalisation and aviation deals favourable to Qatar. Kaili handled parliament’s Middle East relations. Qatar denies all the allegations.
If proved, this constitutes a huge betrayal of public trust. Yet almost whatever happens, the scandal will damage the EU, which likes to lecture the world on democratic values, including standards in public life. This fondness for high horses is not confined to parliament. The European Commission is every bit as sanctimonious. Just ask Hungary, Poland – or the UK.
The “Qatargate” cash-for-influence scandal – the moniker was as inevitable as it is banal – is already being used by the EU’s internal foes as a stick to beat it. Marine Le Pen of France’s National Rally complained that while MEPs were questioning her party’s finances, “Qatar was delivering suitcases full of cash”.
“The question arises: where is the problem with the rule of law? In Poland or in the EU?” asked MEP Dominik Tarczyński, from Poland’s Eurosceptic ruling PiS party.
The scandal seems unlikely to trigger a meltdown on the scale of 1999, when Jacques Santer’s commission resigned en masse amid corruption allegations. But it is lapping at the feet of the current president, Ursula von der Leyen, who stonewalled questions about the role of her Greek commission vice-president, Margaritis Schinas.
Schinas represented the EU at the opening ceremony of the men’s football World Cup in Qatar. He has faced criticism over tweets praising the country’s exploitative, now supposedly reformed labour practices, the subject of a global outcry. Schinas insists he did everything by the book.
And that is part of the EU’s problem. Officials and MEPs are largely self-regulating and face minimal scrutiny. On top of salary, MEPs can claim €9,500 a month in expenses and allowances without providing receipts. They may hold other paid jobs and need not publicly register contacts with agents of foreign states.
Parliament has resisted stronger accountability rules while built-in protections for internal whistleblowers are lacking. Michiel van Hulten, head of Transparency International’s EU office, told Politico that last week’s revelations could be the tip of an iceberg. “There is undue influence on a scale we haven’t seen so far,” he said.
The EU ombudsman, Emily O’Reilly, warned that ineffective anti-corruption safeguards undermined Europe’s efforts to project its interests and values on the world stage. The EU was “a huge global player, and of course, everything from tech companies to states outside the EU is going to try to influence it,” she said.
The scandal may also focus attention on the behaviour of some British MPs before the World Cup. They say they followed UK parliamentary rules in accepting a total of £251,208 worth of gifts from Qatar in the year to October, including luxury hotels and business-class flights, while participating in “fact-finding” missions. Several spoke up for Qatar in subsequent debates. This may be legal. But how do they think it looks?
Qatar is hardly the only illiberal or authoritarian country involved in lobbying elected politicians. Questions have been raised about Morocco, Bahrain and Azerbaijan as a result of the scandal. Yet particular concern centres on the pervasive, compromising effects of Gulf country largesse, typified by Saudi Arabia’s sportswashing.
Nor are the EU and UK institutions the only targets of anti-democratic insider forces. In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is busy abolishing democratic choice in a bid to fix upcoming elections. The inclusion of far-right zealots and racists in Israel’s new government feels like self-sabotage.
Democratic betrayals emanating from within grow more common – and higher profile. In Hong Kong, outrage at the continuing subversion of civil rights by Beijing’s local lackeys is effectively stifled by Rishi Sunak’s weak-kneed theory of “robust pragmatism”. Britain’s spineless kowtowing to Chinese diplomat bullies in Manchester is another stab in the back.
US founding principles, a model for the world, are under assault at home. The rejection by Donald Trump and many Republicans of the 2020 presidential election result produced global shockwaves. Its corrosive effect is still felt internationally, exploited by malign actors such as Russia (which backed Trump in the first place).
Trump hit a new low in democratic perfidy to which imitators descend. Yet his successor, Joe Biden, is hardly perfect. He rightly ostracised the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, over the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and the kingdom’s human rights abuses. Then he undid himself, fist-bumping Salman during a humiliating outing to Riyadh in a futile search for cheap oil.
Biden’s unintended, self-defeating message: democratic principles are negotiable; everything has its price. Watch and weep as, around the world, the voters’ trust, integrity in public life and confidence in representative governance are surreptitiously bartered away in cynical games of influence-peddling and money-politics.
In this global struggle, crooked parliamentarians are but small-time co-conspirators in democracy’s great betrayal.
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