The fight against corruption is bursting the bubble of strongmen. From Serbia to Brazil, from Trump to Orbán

The Bolsonaro clan has been defeated in Brazil; Serbia’s president-cum-ruler, Aleksandar Vučić, has been ousted by a student-led list; Trump has lost, Putin has lost – so say many commentators who are obsessed with geopolitics and international alignments and who interpret every vote, in every corner of the world, as a sign of the global order. Of course, the Bolsonaros are the Brazilian version of Trumpism, with all those children (whom the patriarch Jair refers to not by name but by a number: 01 – zero-one is Flávio, the one who was beaten by the 81-year-old Lula) and their feuds with their stepmother; certainly Vucic is the Serbian embodiment of the kind of European leaders so favoured by both the American and Russian presidents (the Orbán model, so to speak), but if one then takes a closer look at Lula and the student movement, one cannot fail to notice, for example, that the Brazilian president is by no means anti-Putin and that the Serbian students have not uttered a single word about Europe (they are not like the Belarusians or the Georgians, who also look on Belgrade with despondency, because the regime has changed there but not in their own countries).

If one wishes to find a flaw in the global populist and nationalist agenda, one must return to the old adage of ‘follow the money’: money, the relationship between money and politics, and the relationship between money and power. In Serbia, the evidence is glaringly obvious: it can be seen in Sunday’s extraordinary turnout, in the celebrations that erupted after Vučić accepted the election result, and in the mobilisation that cut across age, profession, income and gender. The clearest and most compelling demand of what has become the Serbian Student List is the fight against corruption, with its corollaries concerning the fight against the ‘centralisation of powers’ and respect for the separation of those powers.

It was this struggle that held together a leaderless movement rife with contradictions, and it is precisely the unscrupulous use of money that has defined certain leaders and is, in some ways, also shaping international relations – when people say that Donald Trump takes a transactional approach to everything, they are in fact referring to the power of (his) money. There are some of the very best experts – amongst them, our favourite is Anne Applebaum – who have for years been denouncing the collusion between leaders who are corrupt or prone to corruption, because this is where the chasm lies that swallows up the rule of law and the social contracts of every country. In the United States, which is grappling with a president and a presidential entourage who are conducting business at full throttle, often in defiance of the national (and Western) interest, politicians are emerging within the opposition who are most vocal in denouncing Trump’s corruption and who are also offering alternatives for government.

If there is one thing the people will not forgive their leaders for, it is a lack of transparency regarding money: this happened to the former Hungarian Prime Minister Orbán, and it is happening to the British nationalist populist Nigel Farage, who until May was tipped to become the UK’s next Prime Minister following his victory in the local elections, and who is now in decline after handling millions of pounds without declaring them. The bubble surrounding strongmen, nationalists and extreme populists bursts when money is used unscrupulously, and this proves that no, the wave of extremism is not inevitable; it is possible to govern.