© REUTERS/Radovan Stoklasa

Slovakia may have gotten off to a slow start after the overthrow of communism 30 years ago, but it has since emerged as the star performer of the former Soviet bloc in Central and Eastern Europe. The largely rural country of 5.5 million people is the only Visegrad country in the eurozone and has enjoyed dynamic economic growth in recent years. Nevertheless, like many countries in the region it has been plagued by corruption.

However on March 16, with the surprising victory of an anti-corruption campaigner in the first round of the presidential election, Slovakia showed that it could emerge as a beacon of hope in its immediate neighborhood.

It looks increasingly likely that the March 30 run-off will see the election of 45-year-old lawyer Zuzana Čaputová, nicknamed Slovakia’s Erin Brockovich for her dogged battles against corruption and environmental malfeasance. A political unknown in the country until last year, she is everything that many of her opponents and their peers in other Eastern Europe countries like Hungary and Poland are not: pro-EU, liberal, worldly, principled—and a woman.

In polls, she leads her rival, Maroš Šefčovič, currently the country’s European Commissioner, who is running as an independent but was nominated by the ruling populist-left Smer-Social Democracy party. On March 16, he only managed just 19 percent of the vote compared to Čaputová’s remarkable 41 percent.

A Gust of Fresh Air

Čaputová appears to be exactly the gust of fresh air that Slovakia and much of the region could badly use. The divorced mother of two, who lives with her partner, made her name by opposing a landfill site agreed upon by a big-name oligarch and local politicos near her hometown north of Bratislava, Slovakia’s capital city, for which she won the Goldman Environmental Prize, informally called the Green Nobel. “This small, local case accurately reflects the situation in country,” she said earlier this year, “the battle of the little guy against the political and economic powers that be.”

The grassroots activist Čaputová is a product of Slovak civil society, not the sclerotic political establishment, much of which has been in place since the mid-1990s. Last year, she became vice-chairwoman of one of Slovakia’s newest parties, the left-liberal Progressive Slovakia, which will face its first real test by running in next year’s general election.

Čaputová’s candidacy, with her focus on equal justice for all Slovaks, captured her countrymen’s deep frustration with the graft and clientelism that riddles the country. Slovakia ranks poorly on Transparency International’s corruption register at 57^th in the world, behind Jordan and Rwanda but ahead of Hungary and Croatia. “Corruption was the number one issue by far,” says Gabriel Sipos, director of TI’s Slovakia branch. There has been little serious tackling of corruption, although last year two former construction ministers were jailed for graft.

“Backlash Against Populism”

Milan Nič, a Slovak analyst at the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP) in Berlin, says that while the figure of Čaputová is significant, “this is a backlash against the populism and the captured institutions, such as the courts. People are simply disgusted with the corruption and weak institutions. Many consider it a last chance to change things or else they’ll leave for abroad.”

A turning point came last February, when the country was rocked by murder of the 27-year-old investigative journalist Jan Kuciak and his fiancée, Martina Kusnirova. They were shot to death just as Kuciak was closing a story on ties between Slovakian politicians and the Italian mafia. Čaputová was one of tens of thousands of Slovak citizens who poured onto the streets across the country for weeks on end to protest the killing and stand up for media freedom. The demonstrations brought down Slovakia’s decade-long Prime Minster Robert Fico (who still heads Smer), but not the Smer-led government. Four men were eventually charged with the killings, and in mid-March multimillionaire businessman Marian Kocner was charged with ordering the murder.

On the campaign trail, Čaputová has promised to end what she calls the capture of the state “by people pulling strings from behind.” Also, in overwhelmingly Catholic Slovakia she has spoken in support for gay marriage, the right of gay couples to adopt, and women’s access to abortion. Breaking completely new ground for a national political candidate, she also directly addressed the country’s minorities in their own languages, using Hungarian, Romanesque, and Ruthenian on her Facebook page and on election night to thank her voters.

Moreover, Čaputová further burnished her reformist image with “the most transparent campaign in Slovakia ever,” says TI’s Sipos. “Her campaign bank account detailed every item, documenting how much went to Facebook, billboards, or voters‘ meetings.” Moreover, says Sipos, she was the only candidate who published detailed tax records.

Reaching Beyond the Base

Čaputová’s core support has come from urban voters, young people, ethnic Hungarians, and the liberal middle class that has emerged during the country’s post-Soviet economic upturn. Slovakia was resourceful enough to turn its Cold War-era tank and munitions factories into automobile assembly plants. Today, the country is, per capita, the world’s largest manufacturer of cars. Small, down-at-the-heel cities and towns that a decade ago looked passed over by the transition from communism, now boast revitalized downtowns, attractive cafes, and lots of new cars. In contrast to Romania’s migrants, many Slovaks who left the country have since returned.

However, Čaputová’s campaign bent over backwards to reach beyond her young and progressive base. “Hers is a whole new style of politics,” says writer and poet Juliana Sokolova from the old Habsburg town of Košice in eastern Slovakia. “She’s sincere and empathetic, not confrontational. And she doesn’t speak in political jargon,” says Sokolova, explaining why Čaputová’s appeal crosses traditional party and religious lines.

Just how definitively a Čaputová victory in the run-off will mean a fresh start for Slovakia—and break from the regional trend toward nationalism and authoritarianism—is anything but certain. For one, the current president, Andrej Kiska, is pro-European and has already started an anti-corruption campaign. The presidency itself is not particularly powerful office in Slovakia, although it does play a key role in picking justices for the constitutional court, the country’s highest judicial body. Moreover, surveys show that Slovaks are just as opposed to migration as their neighbors. In polls, the new parties, including Progressive Slovakia, still trail those of the establishment. And last week an unsettling 25 percent of Slovaks voted neither for Čaputová nor Šefčovič, but for far-right candidates.

Might the liberal vibes in Slovakia nevertheless spill over the borders to its neighbors? Hungarian social anthropologist Peter Krasztev from the Budapest School of Economics says his country’s nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orbán isn’t losing sleep over events in Slovakia. “We’ve tried absolutely everything to gain traction against Orbán and it hasn’t worked,” he says. “But still, Čaputová is a glimmer of hope. Maybe if Hungarians find someone as absolutely perfect as she is, really without a flaw, then perhaps we’d have a chance too.”

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© REUTERS/ Inquam Photos

European Parliament committee hearings are normally quite mundane. But then again, they aren’t usually centered around Laura Codruta Kovesi.

Kovesi is Romania’s star anti-corruption prosecutor. And when she took the floor in Brussels in to make her pitch to MEPs for the EU’s new top prosecutor job, she had journalists scrambling for spots and some European lawmakers applauding her sharp rebuttals.

“I am aware that you have been exposed to a lot of negative information about me. I have absolutely nothing to hide,” Kovesi told MEPs last Tuesday (26 February), whose bid for the politically sensitive European Public Prosecutor’s Office has been under siege by Romania’s Social Democrat-led government, which currently holds the EU’s rotating presidency.

The 45-year-old former professional basketball player rose to fame in Romania as the unrelenting prosecutor who has run the National Anticorruption Directorate (DNA) since 2013. Under her leadership, the DNA has launched thousands of investigations, exposing high-level corruption and helping bring about the sentencing of – as she told MEPs – over sixty high-ranking officials, such as ministers and lawmakers.

“You have given us a sense of confidence in the Romanian system,” Ingeborg Grassle, a powerful German MEP leading the budget control committee in the parliament told Kovesi during the hearing.

Cleaning up Corruption in Bucharest

Romania ranked 25th among the EU’s 28 countries on the 2018 Perceived Corruption list compiled by Transparency international, ahead of only of Bulgaria, Greece, and Hungary. However, Kovesi’s efforts have given Romanians new trust in their anti-corruption institutions. According to a 2015 poll, Romanians trust the DNA as much as the Orthodox church, a startling success in one of the most religious countries in the EU, where mistrust in the state is deep-seated.

Kovesi, who also served as the youngest general prosecutor of Romania – a country where judicial reform and anti-graft fight have been under scrutiny by the EU since it has joined the bloc in 2007 – has caught the attention of transparency advocates and the European Commission, which said in its 2016 report on Romania’s judiciary that “the track record of the key judicial and integrity institutions in addressing high-level corruption has remained impressive.”

To her supporters, Kovesi is a heroine standing up to a corrupt political elite; to her critics she is a zealot who has used her powers excessively with a broad interpretation of “abuse of power”. Indeed, Kovesi has not shied away from stepping on the toes of the powerful. Last June, Liviu Dragnea, chair of the ruling Social democratic party (PSD) and de facto leader of the country, received a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence for abuse of office (pending appeal). In 2016, Dragnea had already received a two-year suspended sentence for election fraud, preventing him from serving as prime minister.

The PSD-led government first came for Kovesi last February: the justice minister called for her dismissal, accusing prosecutors under her command of falsifying evidence and saying Kovesi had harmed Romania’s international reputation. While Romanian President Klaus Iohannis initially refused to sack her—he is also a political opponent of Dragnea—a Constitutional Court ruling supporting the government’s position meant that Iohannis was unable to stop her dismissal. A month after Kovesi’s departure, an estimated hundred thousand Romanians took to the streets to protest against the government’s legislative changes weakening the rule of law.

Then when Kovesi decided to seek office on a European level, the Romanian government launched a campaign to stop her. Kovesi announced in December that she would run for the office of the European Public Prosecutor, a new body created with the support of 22 member states to investigate and prosecute fraudulent use of EU taxpayer money. But she faces concocted charges of malfeasance, bribery, and perjury from a new agency set up by Bucharest. She denies the allegations.

“I was independent. My results are speaking for me. We investigated members of different parties. We investigated people that have important positions, wealth. The independence was provided by law. Now, there are attempts to limit our independence,” Kovesi told MEPs last week.

The race for the EU job

The Bucharest government’s efforts to undermine Kovesi’s candidacy put a spotlight on the race. Kovesi was picked by an expert panel to be the best for the job. However, a secret-ballot vote among EU ambassadors ranked a French candidate, Jean-Francois Bohnert as favorite. Kovesi came in second, together with Germany’s aspirant.

Does she have enough support to get the job? While Romania’s campaign against its anti-corruption champion ruffled feathers in western European capitals, it is a problem for any candidate when his or her country is not supporting the bid, an EU diplomat said.

With the two relevant European parliamentary committees firmly supporting Kovesi, the parliament will start negotiations with the representatives of member states, led by the Finnish EU ambassador and including the Portuguese and Croatian ambassadors (whose countries will give the next EU presidencies), to decide on who will get the job in the end.

Bohnert, the French candidate who addressed MEPs in several languages, is a strong candidate and a safe bet with his experience in helping to set up Eurojust, the EU’s judicial cooperation agency.  He told lawmakers that fighting corruption could make the chief prosecutor’s office a new tool to boost democratic trust in the EU, but added that as a prosecutor he would not “name and shame” member states when asked by an MEP what he would do in countries where EU money fraud is systematic.

But Kovesi’s possible rise to power – she would be a rare eastern European woman in top EU position still dominated by western European men – isn’t just unnerving politicians in Bucharest. She has also become a symbol for anti-corruption campaigners in Bulgaria and Hungarian opposition politicians railing against graft in prime minister Viktor Orban’s government.

Maltese center-right MEP and anti-corruption campaigner Roberta Metsola welcomed Kovesi at the parliament hearing by saying that “in spite of every imaginable obstacle being put in your way, your dignified courage in the continued onslaught has inspired people across the continent”.

More Oversight from Brussels

Kovesi’s candidacy also sheds a light on the EU’s efforts to keep a closer eye on how eastern and central European countries spend EU funds. Last year, the commission tabled proposals to link EU funding to the health of the rule of law in member states in an attempt to sanction those governments that threaten the independence of the judiciary.

The commission’s proposal is already interpreted in Warsaw and Budapest as a political attack on eastern member states. Kovesi’s appointment could send a strong signal from the EU to countries on the eastern flank and member states with systemic corruption issues–but selecting such a politicized figure could also prompt a backlash there.

Hungary and Poland are already among the six EU countries that have opted out of the prosecutor’s office, fearing further oversight by EU institutions in the affairs of national governments. Budapest and Warsaw’s interference in the independence of their judiciaries has already triggered an EU sanctions procedure for both countries.

While the member states hope to agree on the top prosecutor by the end of March, negotiations could drag on for months if the parliament and EU countries dig in their positions. “This is all very dramatic,” MEP Claude Moraes, chairman of the civil liberties committee, quipped during the parliament vote on the nominees.

The post Pursuing the Prosecutor appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

© REUTERS/Inquam Photos/Liviu Florin Albei

Romanians are upset, to put it mildly. Over the last two weeks, hundreds of thousands of them have gathered in dozens of cities across the country to protest against government attempts to weaken anti-corruption laws. The demonstrators have chanted, danced, debated, waved signs, and sung the national anthem. And for more than 13 days in a row, they have occupied – and still continue to occupy – Victory Square in central Bucharest, opposite the seat of government.

They were spurred to action after the Social Democratic (PSD)-led government passed a controversial emergency decree to decriminalize official misconduct, where the financial damage was less than 200,000 Romanian Lei (approximately €44,000). The aim was clear: the law would legalize petty bribery.

It was a short-lived decree. The PSD couldn’t ignore the escalating number of protesters – who reached an estimated 200,000 in Bucharest on February 5 – and the international attention. The government bowed to the pressure, issuing a new decree that essentially revoked the original one. The official architect of the initial law, Minister of Justice Florin Iordache, then resigned.

But the public, riding the swell of discontent, wants more. Despite temperatures that dropped to minus seven degrees Celsius last Sunday, tens of thousands gathered once more in front of the government to chant “Thieves!” and “Resign!” In a stunning display of glittering lights beamed around the world, the protesters formed a giant Romanian flag by raising pieces of colored paper in blue, yellow, and red. They want nothing less than the entire government to stand down.

Romanians want to ensure what happened on January 31 can’t happen again. They don’t trust a government that passes laws in the dark of the night with no public debate, especially not when that legislation benefits many members of their own political party who have either been indicted or are on trial for corruption. The current government was elected in December 2016, and the governing party – the PSD – has historically been associated with corrupt practices.

The demonstrations are the largest since the fall of communism in 1989, but the wave of public dissent actually began back in 2012. Protest movements were first triggered by a health reform; public frustration then spilled over into demonstrations against the political elite. In 2013, protests erupted again when the government gave the green light to a gold mine in the Apuseni Mountains of Transylvania, where ancient Roman galleries still remain. These protests, which attracted over 30,000 on one night alone, helped shaped a newfound sense of cultural identity and empowered a civic consciousness. They were also effective: work never began on the mine.

Then there was the tragic nightclub fire in Colectiv in Bucharest that saw 64 people die after an indoor fireworks display ignited the ceiling and walls. Tens of thousands demonstrated, blaming graft for poor safety regulations. This public display of anger forced the then government led by Prime Minister Victor Ponta to resign, ushering in the technocratic leadership. Ponta was already on trial for fraud, money laundering, and tax evasion at that point. The surge of demonstrations cemented the belief among Romanians that their protests could indeed effect change.

Rooting out Corruption

Corruption is not a new phenomenon in Romania – it has always been a serious issue, but the fight against graft has intensified since the country joined the European Union in 2007. Institutions like the National Anti-Corruption Directorate (DNA) started to score major successes by putting several former ministers and top officials behind bars. Adrian Nastase, former prime minister of Romania, along with ministers and members of parliament, were put on trial.

The DNA, led by 43 year-old prosecutor Laura Codruta Kovesi, was launched back in 2002, but it only began to carry out investigations into high level corruption in earnest in 2006. These days, the agency enjoys high confidence among Romanians. Several surveys conducted in recent years put the DNA among the most trusted institutions in Romania, higher even than the Orthodox Church. The PSD has the largest number of indicted members; it’s not a surprise that the party claims the DNA’s investigations are politically motivated.

Despite the DNA’s recent progress, corruption is rooted deep in Romanian mentality. It starts in infant years and ends on the hospital bed; Romanians have to bribe everyone from teachers in school to employees in public institutions and doctors in order to survive. So when the New York Times asked Romanians to share their own experiences of corruption, the answers were quite predictable.

Graft is so chronic that the idea of mayors winning elections from behind bars has become commonplace. In Baia Mare, a city in northwestern Romania, 38-year-old Catalin Chereches won the local elections in 2016 with some 70 percent of the vote to secure his second mandate – even though he was arrested for taking a bribe in his first term.

On the streets of Baia Mare, most residents admitted that they were willing to overlook his legal issues. “Chereches did a lot for our town,” they said. “He repaired streets, built parks and playgrounds for children. So what if he stole a little?”

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