Scandals have become a regular part of politics. In 2017 the chances of victory for Les Républicains’ presidential candidate François Fillon vanished with the investigation into his wife’s salary for a non-existent job. In 2018 Brazil’s judiciary prohibited former president Luis Inácio Lula da Silva from standing again because he was facing charges of taking bribes. This year, François de Rugy, ex-speaker of France’s lower house, resigned as environment minister after the press revealed that he had served lobster and fancy wines to friends at the state’s expense. Pope Francis recently called corruption a ‘cancer’ that devastates societies, and every 9 December, there is a UN-sponsored International Anti-Corruption Day.

Corruption, though universally condemned, is tricky to define. Researcher Anastassiya Zagainova shows the term is applied to ‘violations of the law, defining specific behaviour and its consequences (active and passive corruption, interference, infringing equality of opportunity in tendering for public procurement contracts)’ and also to ‘socially questionable behaviour for which there is no clear punishment (lobbying, tax avoidance, creating offshore shell companies, “revolving doors” between public and private sectors etc)’.

In the US, a business seeking to influence political decisions does not have to act illegally. The 2010 Supreme Court ruling on Citizens United vs Federal Election Commission means it can legally fund a political protégé’s organisation without restriction on the size of its donations. Many countries outlaw such practices, but the US court ruling classed them as a matter of free speech. A report from the Sunlight Foundation claims that between 2007 and 2012, the 200 most politically active US companies spent $5.8bn on such payments at federal level, and in return received benefits worth $4.4trn in subsidies, exemptions and tax reductions.

Changing the law rather than human nature has proved popular. US multinationals aiming to establish themselves in developing countries are allowed to make ‘facilitating payments’ to smooth their path. Rich people can halt legal proceedings by paying off plaintiffs. The shifting line between corruption and legal activities appears subject to the vagaries of the law, and the logic that often underpins the drafting of legislation means the practices of the powerful are brought within the law, while its full severity is reserved for working-class crimes.

Attention accorded to corruption varies geographically and according to social hierarchies; it also changes over time. Between 1981 and 1990, Le Figaro, Le Monde and Libération published 2,630 articles on corruption. In the following decade that figure quadrupled. Why? A 2004 paper by Catherine Fieschi and Paul Heywood suggested the changed nature of political debate in the post-communist era of the early 1990s was to blame: ‘Parties which previously competed for votes on the basis of ideology, yet colluded in corrupt activities, have altered their tactics. The policy platforms which used to characterise and distinguish left and right have increasingly converged, whilst the pressure to demonstrate governmental effectiveness in an increasingly interdependent policy environment has led to an emphasis on technocratic, rather than ideological, solutions. The grounds of political competition have therefore moved, and in place of increasingly otiose ideological disputes, parties have resorted to throwing corruption-related accusations at each other.’

This change was a boon for mainstream media organisations, which used scandals to restore their credibility when challenged for being in the pocket of the elites: if they exposed the wrongdoing of the powerful, how could they be lapdogs?

There was also a deeper ideological shift. With the disappearance of the alternative political model represented by the eastern bloc, the western model became, according to its proponents, the only one possible, the embodiment of reason. The IMF and the World Bank began to put the emphasis on ‘governance’: the idea of technocratic governments run by experts for the common good. For countries of the global South and those of the former communist bloc, converting to free trade or capitalism was not a political choice but a requirement of good management.

Neoliberal institutions focused attention on corruption as it harmed businesses that wanted to enter developing countries: it was an affront to free trade. Researcher Strom C Thacker suggests that ‘by raising the price of goods above their market price, trade barriers may induce businesspersons to bribe their way to exemptions or special treatment.’ International institutions made their financial aid contingent on liberalisation and fighting corruption. The NGO Transparency International, set up by a former member of the World Bank two years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and ubiquitous in measuring corruption, considers it an exclusively public-sector phenomenon. By definition, companies are exempt from its scrutiny.

In reality, Mexico in the 1980s and Russia in the 1990s proved that the sovereignty of the market and attendant privatisations were quite compatible with collusion, bribery and corruption. But this mattered little to those, such as Francis Fukuyama, who saw the collapse of the Soviet bloc as signalling the end of history; in their narrative, moral compasses replaced political ones, so elites maintained their ideological positions but reformulated them as virtue-based. Talk of capitalism changed to talk of economic freedom. Where troops had been sent to Grenada to fight communism, they were now dispatched in defence of human rights.

In Brazil, the left was no longer just an electoral adversary but an enemy whose political stance was a threat to integrity. Two academics calculated that 95% of the articles about corruption in the Brazilian press before the 2010 and 2014 presidential elections were about the Workers’ Party (PT) and only 5% about the conservative PSDB (Brazilian Social Democracy Party), although that was described as the ‘dirtiest’ by the country’s electoral authority. Such coverage gradually leads to corruption not being associated with prominent politicians but with the political views they represent. It invites a conflation of money misappropriated by dishonest leaders with funds spent on raising the living standards of the poorest, who are accused of laziness; both are seen as an unfair (and therefore ‘immoral’) drain on national wealth. Brazil’s new far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro has promised to fight corruption by ‘purging Brazil of the moral and ideological vices’ he associates with the PT.

The growing number of scandals has convinced some on the left that the world would not be such a bad place if only fraud, cheating and corruption could be eradicated. These activists have been transformed by swapping their political compass for a moral one, and where once they fought, now they are just indignant. They used to form organisations in order to take power; now they sign petitions and exhort people to be kinder, greener, more tolerant, less racist, more equitable. Their problem with De Rugy was not that he was environment minister in a government that exacerbated the climate crisis by promoting free trade, but that he spent too much public money on a hair dryer and other personal benefits. Since morality demands doing as you would be done by, the activists’ priority is now not achieving their aims but being decent, fair and kind.

This has consequences for how political struggles are organised, as illustrated at a CGT (France’s oldest trade union confederation) training session for its elected representatives in 2014. A recent union recruit who worked in a large hotel was invited to define the union struggle, and said, ‘The most important thing for me is not choosing sides automatically, it’s being impartial.’ ‘Nonsense,’ the trainer responded. ‘Do you think in the case of conflict, your HR director will wonder what’s fair and impartial? Politics is one side against the other. And your side, as a union member, is the side of the workers.’

In France, the sans-culottes of 1789, the communards of 1871, and the leftwing and union strikers and protestors of 1936 were not fighting corruption, but the powerful. They were not motivated by a desire to behave with rectitude, but by a determination to win. The left arose to change the world, not lecture it.

- Benoît Bréville is editor and Renaud Lambert deputy editor of Le Monde diplomatique. Translated by George Miller.

Copyright ©2019 Le Monde diplomatique — used by permission of Agence Global.