Squeaky-clean Europe is more corrupt than you think

In fighting corruption, Lithuania is one of the European Union’s star pupils. Corruption is hard to measure; it is by nature secret. But Transparency International, a Berlin-based watchdog, gauges how clean countries are perceived to be, and Lithuania went from 48th in the world in 2012 to 34th in 2023. The European Research Centre for Anti-corruption and State-building (ERCAS), an academic outfit that measures public integrity and transparency, rates Lithuania among the top 20 for both.

This is the sort of success story the EU likes to tell about itself. Europe is home to the world’s least corrupt countries, and Eurocrats see their union as a force for reform. The EU generally requires countries to improve their governance before they can join; its regulations are meant to keep them honest once they are in.

Unfortunately, the data over the past decade tell a different story. Lithuania and its Baltic neighbours, Estonia and Latvia, have improved dramatically. But other formerly communist countries that joined the EU in the 2000s have not. Poland, a relatively clean country, got dirtier from 2015 to 2023 under a populist government. Romania jailed thousands of crooked officials, but others often took their places. In Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and Slovakia oligarchs have outlasted prosecutors. Under Viktor Orban’s illiberal rule, Hungary has become as corrupt as some countries in Africa and the Middle East.

The ex-Soviet bloc is not the only region to worry about. Hopes that southern Europe would turn more Scandinavian have not been borne out. The graft that surfaced in Spain during the global financial crisis has led to little reform. Italy has improved, but only from the low bar of Silvio Berlusconi’s scandal-plagued administrations. Greece’s corruption is infamous, and the reforms which the EU and IMF imposed after the euro crisis did little to fix it. In 2019 a Greek prosecutor who went after Novartis, a drug firm, for bribing doctors was fired—and was then prosecuted herself, even though in America the company admitted guilt and paid $347m in fines. (She was acquitted last year.)

Worse, EU institutions have had big scandals of their own. In late 2022 Belgian police arrested several members of the European Parliament and their aides for accepting bribes from Qatar (and seized nearly €1m in retro-style cash). A quarter of MEPs have been entangled in ethical trouble, according to Follow The Money, a Dutch investigative website.

In many countries—such as Armenia, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine—anti-corruption advocates want to join the EU precisely in order to clean up government. If the EU is not doing well at fighting corruption, it suggests these hopes may be misplaced. What is going wrong?

One issue is that although the EU’s reforms reduce corruption, the billions of euros it distributes can encourage it. Corruption tends to be high in countries rich in natural resources—the so-called resource curse. When EU aid goes to countries with weak institutions, “it functions like a resource curse", says Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, a corruption scholar who heads ERCAS.

Indeed, in many big corruption cases EU aid is part of the story. Hungary’s EU-funded infrastructure projects consistently go to businessmen connected to Mr Orban. In the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Romania many big recipients of EU farm subsidies are agri-businesses with dodgy links to politicians. Italy’s EU-backed covid-relief fund was targeted by a €600m fraud scheme for which European prosecutors recently charged dozens of people.

Compared with America, the EU and its members are laggards at enforcement. In 1997 the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, signed an anti-bribery convention. Since then, America has carried out nearly 80% of the successful prosecutions of companies under the treaty. Seizing profits from corruption is hard for European governments: most can do so only when they are tied to a specific criminal conviction. None has “unexplained wealth orders" (UWOs) like those in Britain, which let the government confiscate assets for which there is no plausible legal source.

That will change: in April the EU directed members to pass UWO legislation within 30 months. And the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO), launched in 2021 to go after abuse of EU funds, has been making up the gap with America. EPPO prosecutors filed 139 indictments in 2023, up 50% from the year before, and won freezing orders worth €1.5bn—respectable even by American standards.

The stakes are not just economic. America and the EU see corruption as a security issue: Russia and other autocracies use cash and networks of cronies to hollow out democracies. Corruption creates “vulnerability throughout the economy and the political system", says Richard Nephew, the global anti-corruption co-ordinator at America’s State Department.

A crucial battlefield is Ukraine, where both anti-corruption movements and corruption are strong. Ukrainian activists say the EU-accession process has driven reform, but it has not been smooth. In June anti-corruption advocates heading the infrastructure and reconstruction ministries were ousted. On August 14th the head of the government’s anti-monopoly authority was arrested for allegedly nabbing $1.35m-worth of property. (He denies the charges.)

Of course, such arrests can be seen as proof that reforms are working. Ukraine has world-class online systems for procurement transparency, known as Prozorro and DREAM, that let anyone see how contracts were granted. The country’s anti-corruption investigators are starting to do their jobs, says Tetiana Khutor, head of the Institute of Legislative Ideas, a Kyiv-based legal think-tank. Ukraine’s ambition is to become the next Lithuania. Its fear is that, like Greece, it never manages to get clean—a discouraging failure for Europe’s good-government dreams.