Perspective: Oligarchs, populists, and the EU The Money Farmers: How Oligarchs and Populists Milk the E.U. for Millions

Before 1990, under Communism, farmers labored in the fields that stretch for miles around the town of Csakvar, west of Budapest, Hungary, growing wheat and corn for a government that had stolen their land.

Selam Gebrekidan, Matt Apuzzo, and Benjamin Novak write in the New York Times that today, their children toil for new overlords, a group of oligarchs and political patrons who have annexed the land through opaque deals with the Hungarian government of Victor Orban.

These oligarchs have created a modern twist on a feudal system, giving jobs and aid to the compliant, and punishing the mutinous.

As it turns out, the New York Times reports, these land barons are financed and emboldened by the European Union.

The Time’s journalists write:

Every year, the 28-country bloc pays out $65 billion in farm subsidies intended to support farmers around the Continent and keep rural communities alive. But across Hungary and much of Central and Eastern Europe, the bulk goes to a connected and powerful few. The prime minister of the Czech Republic collected tens of millions of dollars in subsidies just last year. Subsidies have underwritten Mafia-style land grabs in Slovakia and Bulgaria.

Europe’s farm program, a system that was instrumental in forming the European Union, is now being exploited by the same antidemocratic forces that threaten the bloc from within. This is because governments in Central and Eastern Europe, several led by populists, have wide latitude in how the subsidies, funded by taxpayers across Europe, are distributed — even as the entire system is shrouded in secrecy.

A New York Times investigation, conducted in nine countries for much of 2019, uncovered a subsidy system that is deliberately opaque, grossly undermines the European Union’s environmental goals and is warped by corruption and self-dealing.

The Times notes that the EUmachinery in Brussels enables this corruption because confronting it would entail changing a program which helps hold a precarious union together. “European leaders disagree about many things, but they all count on generous subsidies and wide discretion in spending them,” the Times writes.

Bucking that system to rein in abuses in newer member states would disrupt political and economic fortunes across the Continent.

This is why, with the farm bill up for renewal this year, the focus in Brussels isn’t on rooting out corruption or tightening controls. Instead, lawmakers are moving to give national leaders more authority on how they spend money — over the objections of internal auditors.

The program is the biggest item in the European Union’s central budget, accounting for 40 percent of expenditures. It’s one of the largest subsidy programs in the world.

The Times adds:

Yet some lawmakers in Brussels who write and vote on farm policy admit they often have no idea where the money goes.

One place it goes is here in Fejer County, home to Hungary’s populist prime minister, Viktor Orban. An icon to Europe’s far right and a harsh critic of Brussels and European elites, Mr. Orban is happy to accept European Union money. The Times investigation found that he uses European subsidies as a patronage system that enriches his friends and family, protects his political interests and punishes his rivals.

Mr. Orban’s government has auctioned off thousands of acres of state land to his family members and close associates, including one childhood friend who has become one of the richest men in the country, the Times investigation found. Those who control the land, in turn, qualify for millions in subsidies from the European Union.