Half as Corrupt

The first time I visited Moscow, I was struck by how beautiful it was. The parks were full and well kept. The buildings were covered in lights, more brilliantly than anything I had seen in Paris.

I said something about it to a friend who lived there.

“Ever since we got a new mayor who’s only 50 percent as corrupt as the old mayor,” he told me, “things have been much better.”

I understood what he meant. Half as much corruption can make daily life better. But it does not make a government honest. It means the people have learned to measure their hopes against how bad things used to be.

Yesterday, Serbia’s student-backed movement won a historic parliamentary victory over Aleksandar Vučić’s long-dominant political camp. After nearly two years of largely peaceful student-led protests, Vučić conceded defeat. Preliminary estimates put the Student List near a majority in parliament, though the count is not yet final. In Belgrade, people celebrated in the streets.

It is a remarkable achievement. Young people organized, stayed in the streets, built a movement and defeated a government many had come to see as entrenched and corrupt. Their victory deserves to be celebrated.

But victory is the beginning of a test, not the end of one.

The hope that follows a political upset is powerful. It is also dangerous. People want to believe that once the old leaders are gone, the corruption is gone with them. We may be tempted to believe the same thing in America if the Democrats win next week and begin curbing the Trump family’s corruption.

But changing the people in office does not necessarily change the system that made corruption useful. The machinery remains. The incentives remain. The temptation to use power for private benefit remains.

That is what the Moscow story taught me. A mayor who is half as corrupt can make a city better. But if the standard is only that the new mayor is less corrupt than the old one, corruption is still the standard by which government is judged.

The lesser-of-two-evils argument traps us there. We choose the side we believe will do less harm, then treat the reduction in harm as a victory over the system. One party may be less corrupt than the other. One government may be less abusive. One leader may be less dangerous. But if both sides depend on the same machinery of money, favors and concentrated power, the machinery survives whoever wins.

Serbia’s students have earned the chance to prove that a new generation can govern differently. The question is not whether they are better than the government they defeated. The question is whether they can make the rules harder for any government to corrupt.

That means independent institutions, public decisions people can inspect, consequences for officials who abuse power, and a government that serves citizens rather than asking them to settle for a cleaner version of the same deal.