How elections can be bought by foreigners
by Simon Kuper,
2016-02-16 05:52:09.0
PART of the function of the American election campaign is to let the rest of the world gawp and laugh at the US. Hordes of improbable narcissists compete to become the most powerful person in the world, unhindered by much knowledge of said world.
Amid the fake piety, only one thing is real: the money that funds them. Even many Americans now feel that campaign spending has got out of hand.
Primary voters have punished Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush for their proximity to donors, and rewarded Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump for staying pure.
But while foreigners smirk at Americans, most of us have a more insidious campaign-finance problem back home.
At least the US process is corrupted chiefly by home-grown US money. In many countries, foreign funds now do the job.
Buying into other people’s political systems is a bright idea that is conquering the world. Various trends in globalisation have encouraged it: ever more countries hold elections; ever more major powers seek influence abroad; and ever more billionaires can afford to buy foreign elections.
US campaigns have become so pricey that many American donors now see better returns on investment in smaller economies. For instance, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gets more than 90% of his funding for his primary campaigns from American donors.
In Britain’s coming European referendum, Goldman Sachs and other American banks are among the biggest funders of the anti-Brexit campaign.
Meanwhile, says the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD’s) new report, Financing Democracy, "anti-Islam groups in the US have provided financial support to Dutch politician Geert Wilders … whose Freedom party is the least transparent Dutch parliamentary group and a rallying point for Europe’s far right". A year before national elections, the Freedom party leads the Dutch polls.
But let’s not single out American money. "The Kremlin is working hard to buy off and co-opt European political forces, funding both right-wing and left-wing antisystemic parties throughout Europe," says US vice-president Joe Biden. France’s Front National borrowed €9.4m from the First Czech Russian Bank in Moscow.
Even xenophobic parties love foreign money. The Greek far-right Golden Dawn took the well-trodden Balkan nationalist path of fundraising among the diaspora in Australia, until media kicked up a fuss.
Like global south-to-south trade, south-to-south political funding is growing fast. China likes to help out African ruling parties, says Patrick Smith, editor of the Africa Confidential newsletter.
Officials of the African National Congress (ANC) have long benefited from training at the Chinese Communist Party’s leadership academy in Pudong.
Now the ANC is creating a Chinese-inspired academy at home in Venterskroon. Possibly coincidentally, the ANC’s head of research discovered in the course of a Chinese study tour last year that China has "opposition parties, whose role was to assist the government to govern" — a model for SA’s "rowdy, noisy and disagreeable opposition", he added, in a newspaper opinion piece.
Middle Eastern regimes have also got into the campaign-finance game. Qatar funded various Islamist movements in the Arab spring (mostly betting on losing horses). Allies of Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak explain that the mysterious $680m discovered in his bank account was simply a political donation from the Saudi royal family. (Malaysia’s attorney-general has cleared Najib of wrongdoing over the payment, adding that the prime minister had returned $620m of it.) Most countries have laws against foreign political funding.
But "money-laundering schemes and other techniques are used to evade them", says the OECD. One method, it adds, is "setting up branches of the political party disguised as other organisations, such as think-tanks … sometimes referred to as ‘offshore islands’ of political parties".
In the age of global companies, it’s hard to say whether a donation is foreign or not. American subsidiaries of the Swiss bank UBS, the Belgian-owned beer group InBev and other global groups generously funded the last US presidential campaign.
National elections no longer work very well in an unregulated, globalised world.
© The Financial Times Limited 2016
US Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton reacts as she takes the stage for a rally at the state house after filing her declaration of candidacy to appear on the New Hampshire primary election ballot in Concord, New Hampshire, on November 9. Picture: REUTERS/BRIAN SNYDER
PART of the function of the American election campaign is to let the rest of the world gawp and laugh at the US. Hordes of improbable narcissists compete to become the most powerful person in the world, unhindered by much knowledge of said world.
Amid the fake piety, only one thing is real: the money that funds them. Even many Americans now feel that campaign spending has got out of hand.
Primary voters have punished Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush for their proximity to donors, and rewarded Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump for staying pure.
But while foreigners smirk at Americans, most of us have a more insidious campaign-finance problem back home.
At least the US process is corrupted chiefly by home-grown US money. In many countries, foreign funds now do the job.
Buying into other people’s political systems is a bright idea that is conquering the world. Various trends in globalisation have encouraged it: ever more countries hold elections; ever more major powers seek influence abroad; and ever more billionaires can afford to buy foreign elections.
US campaigns have become so pricey that many American donors now see better returns on investment in smaller economies. For instance, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gets more than 90% of his funding for his primary campaigns from American donors.
In Britain’s coming European referendum, Goldman Sachs and other American banks are among the biggest funders of the anti-Brexit campaign.
Meanwhile, says the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD’s) new report, Financing Democracy, "anti-Islam groups in the US have provided financial support to Dutch politician Geert Wilders … whose Freedom party is the least transparent Dutch parliamentary group and a rallying point for Europe’s far right". A year before national elections, the Freedom party leads the Dutch polls.
But let’s not single out American money. "The Kremlin is working hard to buy off and co-opt European political forces, funding both right-wing and left-wing antisystemic parties throughout Europe," says US vice-president Joe Biden. France’s Front National borrowed €9.4m from the First Czech Russian Bank in Moscow.
Even xenophobic parties love foreign money. The Greek far-right Golden Dawn took the well-trodden Balkan nationalist path of fundraising among the diaspora in Australia, until media kicked up a fuss.
Like global south-to-south trade, south-to-south political funding is growing fast. China likes to help out African ruling parties, says Patrick Smith, editor of the Africa Confidential newsletter.
Officials of the African National Congress (ANC) have long benefited from training at the Chinese Communist Party’s leadership academy in Pudong.
Now the ANC is creating a Chinese-inspired academy at home in Venterskroon. Possibly coincidentally, the ANC’s head of research discovered in the course of a Chinese study tour last year that China has "opposition parties, whose role was to assist the government to govern" — a model for SA’s "rowdy, noisy and disagreeable opposition", he added, in a newspaper opinion piece.
Middle Eastern regimes have also got into the campaign-finance game. Qatar funded various Islamist movements in the Arab spring (mostly betting on losing horses). Allies of Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak explain that the mysterious $680m discovered in his bank account was simply a political donation from the Saudi royal family. (Malaysia’s attorney-general has cleared Najib of wrongdoing over the payment, adding that the prime minister had returned $620m of it.) Most countries have laws against foreign political funding.
But "money-laundering schemes and other techniques are used to evade them", says the OECD. One method, it adds, is "setting up branches of the political party disguised as other organisations, such as think-tanks … sometimes referred to as ‘offshore islands’ of political parties".
In the age of global companies, it’s hard to say whether a donation is foreign or not. American subsidiaries of the Swiss bank UBS, the Belgian-owned beer group InBev and other global groups generously funded the last US presidential campaign.
National elections no longer work very well in an unregulated, globalised world.
© The Financial Times Limited 2016
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