The Fight Against Corruption is the Latest Casualty of Political Polarization

By Eguiar Lizundia, Senior Governance Manager at the International Republican Institute

Much ink has been spilled over the hyper-partisanship that seems to have taken over American life — and with the mid-term elections delivering a divided Congress, the sense that we are locked in a state of permanent polarization seems to be the conventional viewpoint.

This isn’t a uniquely American problem. According to the latest available World Values Survey, political polarization in Latin America seems even worse than in the U.S., and the fight against corruption has been routinely weaponized for both legitimate and illegitimate ends.

Although the politicization of corruption allegations is hardly a new phenomenon south of the border, Latin America provides particularly striking examples of the different ways anticorruption efforts are being politicized and inadvertently undermined.

Paradoxically, even though corruption is not the patrimony of a single ideology or party, few in the region have worked to depoliticize the issue. In fact, the opposite seems to be true: by putting anti-corruption proceedings at the center of the political debate, politicians across the region are turning well-founded federal investigations into ammunition for conspiracy theories.

In Argentina, former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner is facing charges for her role in a corruption network established under her husband’s presidency and has responded by accusing the current Argentine government and the U.S. of “promoting a regional strategy to prosecute leaders who lifted people out of poverty.”

Similarly, former Brazilian president Lula da Silva sought to deflect attention from his conviction for corruption-related crimes by accusing sitting president Michel Temer of being a “growing threat to national sovereignty.” Temer’s party and political allies appear to have also used the crackdown on corruption as a way to neutralize Lula and her successor Dilma Rousseff, while Temer himself also faces corruption allegations. The stunning victory of far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro in the Brazilian presidential elections would not have been possible without his strong anti-corruption message that demonized the current political establishment.

When corruption accusations are used as a cudgel for partisan warfare, popular understanding of the stakes and importance of anti-corruption reform suffers, as does confidence in democratic institutions.

A second indication that political polarization has permeated the fight against corruption in Latin America is the nascent trend to use a key democratic institution, the referendum, to pass anti-corruption legislation. Referenda are problematic for several reasons and binary choices can be a bad mechanism to make complex decisions that should be subject to a process of deliberation and ample consensus. In the context of the fight against corruption, the move towards anti-corruption referenda reinforces the current polarized landscape.

Colombia’s recent anti-corruption plebiscite is the latest example of how even popular measures can be subject to partisan politics.

Even though the “consultation” was brought forth through a citizens’ proposal and President Iván Duque himself voted for the provisions included in the ballot, the vote failed to meet the threshold for binding change. To be sure, the measures proposed received the support of more than 99 percent of the nearly 12 million people who voted, but the most influential opinion figure in the country and Duque’s political godfather, former president Álvaro Uribe, characterized the vote as “misleading” and a “waste of public resources”, discouraging people from voting. Ironically, Uribe held an anti-corruption referendum himself in 2003.

Ecuador’s 2018 omnibus referendum, which included a proposal to bar officials convicted of corruption from politics, was also interpreted by many as a plebiscite on the notoriously divisive former president, Rafael Correa.

Even when anti-corruption votes are successful, they set a precedent for governments to use referenda as a tool to disable political adversaries. This past summer, Peruvian President Martín Vizcarra put forward a proposal to hold a referendum aimed at uprooting corruption, largely seen as a thinly veiled attempt to challenge the opposition-run Congress.

One could certainly argue that polarization over important issues is not in itself a threat to democracy.

After all, isn’t robust disagreement the lifeblood of a free political system?

Yet the current trend is cause for concern not because of passionate disagreement over policies, but in the way in which it is beginning to undermine processes and institutions that should be non-partisan.

Moreover, this politicization of corruption is likely to achieve the opposite of what an anti-corruption program requires: consistent, impartial legal provisions and safeguards that can reduce the room and appetite for dishonest behavior in public officials. A unilateral agenda to counter corruption risks becoming another short-sighted political trick that will corrode the faith of voters in democratic institutions. In a world in which authoritarian actors seek to sow division within democracies to shore up their own kleptocratic power structures, democratic political leaders and activists must seek long-term, consensus-built solutions to root out corruption, and resist the temptation to politicize this issue further.