How Europe can avoid ending up like the US

Corruption scandals once again rock the European parliament.

This is part of a worrying trend, where research by investigative journalists in Brussels has revealed that almost a quarter of EU lawmakers were involved in scandals or breaking the law, on issues ranging from harassment to corruption.

Does this mean that EU democracy is on the same path as the US, where 80% of Americans now believe that politicians serve their donors rather than the people in their districts?

Or could it be that, actually, some low level corruption by a minority of its 720 parliament members, is REALLY NOT such a big deal in today’s turbulent world?

After all, if we, again, compare it to the US, what USED to be scandals is now just another Tuesday. A lawmaker like Nancy Pelosi outperforming all other hedge funds? don’t worry about it. Putting a key government contractor in charge of restructuring the government? That’s fine. A sitting president literally launching a MEME coin? there’s bigger things to worry about.

On top of that, highlighting low level corruption in the EU gives people like Hungary’s Victor Orban, under whose rule Hungary became Europe’s most corrupt country, an opportunity to say stuff like this

“””I think this body has some expertise when it comes to corruption

meaning that the EU cannot credibly criticize Hungary, even though the level of grand corruption is on a completely different scale. So, even if this is morally ABSOLUTELY wrong, could it actually be, that the CORRECTION decision FOR EUROPEANS IS —PARADOXICALLY— TO focus LESS on SMALL SCALE EU corruption, to ensure the public remains interested in large scale corruption and conflicts of interest like we see in Hungary and increasingly the US?

To answer that question, as always on this channel, I’ve done a deep dive into the scientific literature how corruption undermines democracy AND the other way around.

But, first, I set out to uncover how bad the problem really is. In other words,

Is the EU actually getting more corrupt and undemocratic?

To answer this question though, I think that as an academically trained researcher, I should be honest about my limitations. I may read a lot of research reports and papers, but I don’t walk around Brussels speaking truth to power.

This is where ‘Follow the Money’ EU comes in, one of the very few journalistic watchdogs focused on the European Union itself. They have essentially uncovered two very worrying trends about the European Union. The first is increased corruption scandals at the European parliament and the second is increased secrecy at the European commission, especially since Ursula von der Leyen became its president.

So, let’s first talk about increased corruption in the European parliament. Although, of course, it could be that the parliament was always this corrupt, but that now more scandals are uncovered thanks to better policing. In any case, the worrying trend of increased corruption scandals started in 2022, with what came to be known as Qatargate. In this scandalous episode high ranking members of the parliament, including one of its vice presidents, allegedly took hundreds of thousands of Euros from the Moroccan and Qatari governments to represent their interests. Then, just 2 years after promising better ethical controls, the parliament was again shook by a similar case where several members were allegedly paid considerable sums to speak favorably about Chinese telecom giant Huawei. This scandal came to be known as Huawei gate. And, finally, now we have what I could call Marine Le Pen gate, where far-right French politician Marine le Pen was convicted for misusing parliament money to fund activities from her own French party.

But, in this last case, things got even more shady as Follow the Money research has shown that this practice, for which Le Pen got convicted, was actually very wide spread…

In fact, hold on, perhaps it makes more sense for Lise Witteman, deputy editor in chief at Follow the Money Brussels, to explain this herself.

<add skype call sound?>

Lise, thanks for taking my call. Bedankt voor je hulp. Ben je er klaar voor?

<Interview MM ftm - Recording 1 - 1:15 Lise says: “kom maar op”>

So, Lise, Follow the Money has reported that this practice of siphoning of EU parliament money is actually very widespread. But not everyone gets into trouble for it. How does that work?

“””So that’s quite a painful issue because what we’ve seen is that over the last couple of years actually really more than a hundred members of the European Parliament have been misspending money meant to pay European Parliament assistance and only a few of them get actually sent through to the prosecutors to be dealt with.  And what we’ve noticed is that mostly members of the European Parliament who are part of far-right those cases are being sent to prosecutors while others may just get to hear just pay the money back and things will be fine. **So obviously the European Parliament hasn’t admitted it this but as we compare the numbers and the cases we’ve seen we worry that there is really sometimes a political system behind this and this is especially worrisome because I don’t think that Le Pan shouldn’t have been convicted. she did have this fraud case but I do think everybody should be treated the same. And this fuels obviously into the narrative of the populist and into the mistrust of citizens into the European Union.“””

which brings us to the second worrying trend which is… increased secrecy under commission president Ursula von der Leyen. For example, there’s the Pfizergate scandal where Ursula von der Leyen made a deal to buy vaccines at the height of the pandemic I believe. But, whereas usually the conditions of these types of deals would become public knowledge at some point, Lise’s colleague Alexander is still being stonewalled for the details

<maybe get sound somewhere from Lise’s interview here where she says: “Yes” or something similar then cut to Lise:>

“””when, Alexander Font one of follow the on his colleagues or when the European prosecutor or the European Court of Auditors or other journalists, everyone who were quiet require it after those, messages. Nobody has seen them up until now. So in that sense, we can’t hold, formal line accountable for it, which is one of the basics of, of a democracy that you can, that you are able to question the people in power.“””