21.05.2021 – 16:07
Until the ceasefire, the world’s attention was focused on Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, which may have interested Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is facing trial for corruption allegations.
And Netanyahu is hardly the only populist leader in legal danger.
From Austria to the United Kingdom to the United States, similar investigations are underway. Have democracies finally found the means and readiness to defeat their internal enemies?
To answer this question, let’s start by looking at the model for anti-democratic populism: former US President Donald Trump. He is between prosecutors in New York (for possible taxes and other business-related crimes) and Atlanta (for his efforts to overturn the 2020 U.S. presidential election).
Some of Trump’s closest aides have also been targeted.
Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who became Trump’s personal lawyer, is facing a federal investigation into his relationship with Ukraine.
For Trump aides, such investigations are completely illegal: prosecutors are representatives of a “state” determined to protect corrupt elites.
Most prosecutors who have investigated Trump and his associates have done so as if on tiptoe.
More broadly, it may be premature to conclude that America’s democratic institutions have proven their resilience by passing the Trump stress test.
A newly sealed court document revealed that, last year, Trump’s Department of Justice secretly received a call to identify a Twitter user who had been mocking U.S. Representative Devin Nunes, a close ally of Trump.
So yes, America’s legal institutions have supposedly returned to office, but were greatly weakened during Trump’s leadership.
How can we be so sure that they will not be weakened again — or even destroyed — in the future?
A similar story is unfolding in Austria. Chancellor Sebastian Kurz has often manipulated investigators and prosecutors. He has called it a corruption probe triggered by the so-called Ibiza Case.
Kurz himself is now being investigated for allegedly committing false testimony during the Ibiza Case investigation.
But the timing of the investigation – a moment when Kurz’s popularity is crate – is probably not a coincidence.
The scandal erupted in 2019, but only now have Austrian judges and investigators had the courage to challenge Kurz.
Populists claim to base their power on representing the will of the people, including demands for security and “law and order.”
But the truth is that populism is fueled by human weakness – shyness, arrogance and shielding – from which legal institutions are not immune.
And while populism may be spreading in many countries, human weakness is an infinitely renewable resource.
Nina L. Khrushcheva, Professor of International Affairs at The New School, co-authored (with Jeffrey Tayler) most recently the book In the Footsteps of Putin: The Search for the Soul of an Empire in Eleven Time Zones of Russia.
Translated and adapted by Project Syndicate / konica.al
