Friday, 29 Mar 2024

Opinion | Eastern Europe’s Populist Scam

What is galling is how openly Prime Minister Viktor Orban does it, blaming the European Union for every imagined indignity or interference in Hungary’s affairs, while milking billions from Brussels to enrich his cronies and prop up his illiberal rule. He is not alone, as a Times investigation of the bloc’s lavish farm subsidies demonstrates in shocking detail — the governments of several formerly Communist Eastern European states have also cynically taken advantage of the union’s largess through opaque deals, feeding a new class of land barons.

Perhaps even more galling is that the European Union knows all this, but prefers not to see or hear about the corruption for fear of upsetting the precarious bonds that hold the union together. One of the cardinal rules of the bloc is to defer to national leaders as much as possible to avoid just the sort of charges of infringing on national sovereignty that populist leaders across Europe, and Brexiteers in Britain, are so fond of making.

Yet the Common Agricultural Policy, a mainstay of the union from its founding, is the biggest item in its central budget, accounting for about 40 percent of expenditures, or about $65 billion. Its mechanisms and focus have been regularly challenged and altered, but the fundamental notion of protecting the rural way of life has remained at its heart.

Without effective oversight, however, the funds allotted to the bloc’s newest members — all provided by European taxpayers — have often become a lavish slush fund for political insiders, helping them amass wealth and consolidate power. The examples cited in the Times study are appalling — in the Czech Republic, the prime minister, Andrej Babis, is a billionaire whose companies collected at least $42 million in agricultural subsidies last year. In Bulgaria, the Academy of Science has found that 100 entities collect three-quarters of the main type of the union’s agricultural subsidies. In Slovakia, the top prosecutor has acknowledged the existence of an “agricultural Mafia,” and a journalist investigating the infiltration of the farm industry by Italian mobsters was murdered last year.

And, of course, Hungary, where Mr. Orban arranged for political allies and family members to buy up land owned by the former Communist nation and to collect rich European Union subsidies on it. Then at political rallies, he assails the European Union for seeking to strip away farm aid and use the money to bring in migrants.

There are many reasons that crony capitalism has found fertile soil in former Communist countries, not least among them a cavalier attitude toward defrauding the state that was prevalent in the secretive, centralized systems of the Soviet bloc. Leaders like Mr. Orban have also exploited a widespread sense in Central and East European societies of being patronized and ignored by the richer democracies to their west, and of being pushed toward socially progressive attitudes that still seem alien and decadent in the East. This makes it easy for populist politicians to depict European Union policies as the successor to Communist diktat while treating its handouts as their due, an approach similar to that of American conservatives who rail against “socialism” but regard ethanol credits or the oil depletion allowance as their entitlement.

But the European Union’s see-no-evil approach to the misuse of billions in taxpayer funds is an unnecessary, patronizing and self-defeating concession to the new members. It’s a payoff to corrupt leaders to keep them in the European camp even as they blithely defy the bloc’s policies on immigration, rule of law and corruption.

The story in The Times of Jozsef Angyan, who formerly worked with Mr. Orban in the mistaken belief that they shared the goal of helping small farmers, is instructive. Mr. Angyan at first helped Times reporters with their investigation, then stopped returning their calls. “How should I continue when nobody is behind me?” he told an acquaintance.

Yet instead of standing behind reformers like Mr. Angyan, European Union officials regularly reject efforts to make the subsidy system more accountable and transparent. The officials actively concealed data sought by the Times reporters, claiming either that it didn’t exist or that it was too cumbersome to produce, and anxiously kept tabs on the investigation.

The response of the union’s officials, once the Times investigation was published, was that their job was not to do the work of national governments, and that they were “acting precisely within our powers.” That may be, given current rules, but it should not prevent European Union commissioners and legislators from raising questions about how public funds are distributed and seeking rules that would address the worst abuses.

It may not be the job of the European Union to run member countries, but neither should the union be in the business of propping up rulers who deliberately subvert the purpose of its subsidies.

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