Oligarchs in Eastern and Southeast Europe

Hundreds of thousands of checks protest against their prime minister, Andrey Babes. He's also one of the richest people in the country. But how did Dad get rich?

Since the time of communism, as a member of the party, he has been the manager of the Czech state firm for foreign trade, Bitrimex. With his advice, Petrimex created a new venture, Agrofert, which was then purchased by non-remarkable Swiss investors, old friends like he called Babes. Soon Babis became the sole owner of the company. He bought the media and got into politics. Babes is now accompanied by accusations of fiscal fraud, suspicion of subsidies fraud and of not properly using EU funds at the time he was minister of finance and prime minister. The Czech prosecution is investigating from the beginning of June.

Andrej Babes embodys the way politics is made in Eastern and Southeast Europe. Money is power; who has money wants power; and who has power knows that it takes money to secure it. For example, by buying media. After the fall of the Communist system, Communists who changed the tablet became more and more aware. State and party wealth, through suspicious roads, became private property; the new rich were the old communists and they used this money to stay in power for years alike in Romania or Bulgaria.

New parties that climbed into power behind them, and who defined themselves as conservative citizens, (as Prime Minister Victor Orban's Fidesz's party soon learned how things are done. Even then they created their oligarchs, awarding state tenders to their loyal ones by giving them taste of EU subsidies spices.

We in Hungary have our oligarchs. In the language of the people, one of them was called <x0). Previously he had a firm that repaired only gas pipelines. Meszaro was an old friend of Orban. Today he is like Babes, the second richest man in Hungary. But there's a difference with Babes. Ceku exercises his power; Meszaros has no power and knows the place that Viktor Orban must hold. His childhood friend, Leos Simiscska, once tried: He was the man who offered them before the party until he ran into Orban. Now nobody hears about Simiscscan anymore. However: We in Hungary do not define politics, but politics defines oligarchs.

One of the roots of oligarchic evil is the so-called “EU co-ordination funds” (the EU-made telephone for expanding road infrastructure and protecting the environment in the EU's worst economic countries, St. red.) The basic idea of Brussels was that through these funds the economic level of the EU's poorest countries to the richest ones, so it's also the word “cohesion”. With this convergence, there should be some value approach: Democracy, free market, economy and legal state.

In Central and Eastern European countries, this has been seen more carefully, and it has been concluded that a large part of these tools, often provided for infrastructure projects, eventually flow back to major Western European concerts that have technical and competitive capacities to win these public competitions. So, part of it is a money that only first goes east, but once returns to the West.

In this sense, the epidemic of European oligarchs is also in a sense an effort to keep these funds in the country. For example, in Hungary they were openly supported, with the intention of politically loyal businessmen taking a secular order as businesspeople. Orban speaks of “neomertilism” This has been an economic phase in European history in which local industries with protectionist measures were established. If you'd like to call it that, this is a kind of “patriotic corruption”.

I personally don't appreciate it, and I don't believe that in the long term, this serves a competitive economy; if energy focuses on receiving subsidies. The EU itself appears to have already realised that the entire idea of convergence of values does not function (in the EU's new budget, the poorest countries will not be subsidised in that form, but only those “politically correct”, so who accepts refugees.

Let's close the EU funds faucet. This is a tool that makes Brussels more important than it should be and weakens economic and political structures in many member states. We in Eastern Europe have almost joined the West, and thanks to these funds. But it's time to cut this cord. Time to develop a culture of enterprises that rewards innovative ideas and courage, rather than a desire for power and political loyalty.