Billionaires vs Democracy

The richest man in the world is trying to buy the U.S. presidential election in order to bestow it, like a burnt offering, upon his preferred candidate.

Multi-billionaire Elon Musk is not only pouring $75 million of his own money into Donald Trump’s campaign. He is now offering payments to voters in swing states in the form of a “lottery” that skirts, if not violates, U.S. election laws. What started out as $47 for registered voters in Pennsylvania who endorsed his on-line petition has become a million bucks a day from now until the election to some lucky signatory in a swing state. Federal law prohibits such incentives to register to vote, but the penalty is minimal (for Musk) and in any case wouldn’t be assessed until after the election.

A billionaire, in other words, has gone all in to support a billionaire on behalf of billionaires the world over.

This billionaires-for-billionaires approach certainly has precedents in the United States. Right-wing plutocrats famously rallied behind Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election. But it’s Trump that billionaires have really glommed onto. For instance, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam were key donors in Trump’s earlier runs. Trump’s current transition co-chair, Howard Lutnick, is a billionaire financier.

A comparably blatant effort to buy an election has been on display in Moldova. In this tiny country sandwiched between Ukraine and Romania, billionaire Ilan Shor sent $15 million to 130,000 citizens in exchange for their pledge to vote against pro-EU leader Maia Sandu and a referendum on enshrining the goal of EU membership in the country’s constitution. In a particularly unappetizing form of repatriation, some of that payola comes from the billion dollars that Shor stole from three Moldovan banks in 2014.

A “robbing hood,” indeed.

Half of Moldova turned out to vote in this critical election. Some showed up at the polls thinking that they’d be paid immediately, according to the BBC:

A BBC producer heard a woman who had just dropped her ballot in the transparent box ask an election monitor where she would get paid. When we asked directly whether she had been offered cash to vote, she admitted it without qualms. She was angry that a man who had sent her to the polling station was no longer answering her calls. “He tricked me!” she said.

Not only you, my dear.

The good news, in this out-and-out battle between billionaires and democracy, is that Shor failed. The referendum passed by the slenderest of margins (given the general popularity of the EU in that part of the world, the closeness of the vote was nonetheless sobering). And Sandu, the current president of the country, won the first round of voting convincingly with 41 percent, while Shor’s preferred candidate, the pro-Moscow Aleksandr Stoianoglo, garnered only 26 percent. Unfortunately, Sandu will face a united opposition in the second round.

Two elections this month in the former Soviet region—in Moldova and Georgia—showcase this war between wealth and commonwealth. The Russian-allied kleptocrats face off against the Europe-aligned democrats to see which way the post-Soviet space will turn. Ukraine, of course, is fighting an actual war along precisely those battle lines.

The Ukrainian scenario is the ultimate threat, even here in the United States. Democracy may well triumph over the billionaires in the U.S., Moldovan, and Georgian elections. But they will be Pyrrhic victories if the countries involved descend into the kind of armed conflict that Ukraine is currently experiencing.

Why Moldova Is Pivotal

Are you worried about how divided the United States is? It could be worse.

It could be Moldova.

In the early 1990s, a thin strip of the country tried to remain within the disintegrating Soviet Union, then launched a war of secession against the newly independent Moldovan government. The semi-autonomous “state” of Transnistria, where Russian is more commonly spoken than Romanian, emerged from a ceasefire agreement, and Russian “peacekeepers” are supposed to maintain the tenuous status quo. No UN member states recognize the “country” of Transnistria, and no legitimate governments appreciate the breakaway region’s anachronistic allegiance to a Soviet past and its current commitment to organized crime.

The Moldovan government faces another potential secessionist movement from the Gagauz, who speak a Turkic language and whose nationalism has brought them in alignment with the Kremlin. Russian leader Vladimir Putin has fostered close ties with Gagauz leader Evgenia Gutul to drive yet another wedge into Moldova.

In addition to supporting secessionist movements, the Kremlin has launched several other efforts to destabilize Moldova and bring it back into the Russian fold. In 2023, according to the Moldovan government, Russia directed cyberattacks and fake bomb threats at the country. Even as it was fighting in Ukraine, Russia plotted a coup to topple the EU-aligned government of Maia Sandu. Western governments have warned Sandu to expect more of the same if she wins reelection.

Ukraine is currently trying to prevent the expansion of the Russian empire and the consolidation of an illiberal zone on Europe’s edge. It has long wanted to join the European Union. Russia first seized Ukrainian territory to scuttle that bid back in 2014.

Now it’s Moldova’s turn to risk Russia’s ire by facing West. The future trajectory of Moldova will demonstrate whether Putin’s illiberalism or the EU’s liberalism has the upper hand in the region.

Meanwhile, in Georgia

Another country, another billionaire, another challenge to democracy.

In Georgia, billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili is the country’s richest person and the founder of the current ruling party, Georgia Dream. As with Ilan Shor, Ivanishvili parrots the Kremlin line that voters shouldn’t push their country into war with Russia by moving closer to the EU. Toward that end, the Georgia Dream government—over the objections of its own dissenting president—pushed through legislation patterned on Russia’s foreign agent law to reduce the influence of outside (read: Western) organizations on the country’s politics. But what such laws really do is reduce the influence of independent and dissenting voices within the country. Iskra Kirova of Human Rights Watch explains:

By stigmatizing independent civil society, media and other dissenting voices as “trojan horses,” “foreign agent” laws have offered a convenient framing to delegitimize and isolate them. In addition, they have also helped to impose harsh monitoring and reporting requirements and shut critics out of public life. As the promotion of democratic practices and human rights threatens authoritarians’ grip on power, “foreign agent” laws offer a handy tool to discredit these activities by equating them with promoting the interests of a foreign power.

Laws like these halted Georgia’s EU accession process.

The electoral choice this upcoming weekend will be just as stark as the one in Moldova: will voters reject the Kremlin or reject the EU? Georgia, like Moldova, is a divided country, with two secessionist regions—South Ossetia and Abkhazia—that receive Russian support. It’s not difficult to imagine a Ukrainian scenario for this country as well.

Salome Zourabichvili, the current president, has been trying to unify the opposition against Ivanishvili’s Georgia Dream. Unlike Maia Sandu, however, she doesn’t have much power at her disposal to counter the money and the manipulation of a single wealthy man. It takes more than pretty words to beat back billionaires.

From Democracy to Oligarchy

Billionaires are a trump card that can disrupt democracy by exploiting the dreams of some people to acquire enormous wealth, become famous, and break the law with impunity. Once billionaires win, however, they become the law. As in Russia, the oligarchs collaborate with the ruling party to transform politics into patronage and economics into outright theft.

To do this, they don’t have to break the law: they make the law.

In the United States, such an oligarchy would look a lot like the state of affairs at the impishly named X. An administration bought and paid for by Musk—and that reciprocates with lucrative contracts and tax cuts—would impose its definition of “free speech” by de-platforming (or jailing) all impertinent journalists. It would deregulate government by firing much of the civil service, eliminating all constraints on power and accountability. And it would pretend to run the economy like a business all the while piling up debt.

That’s what happens when infantile oligarchs are allowed to give full vent to their ids. That has been the single “greatest” contribution to politics of the Muskites—to somehow transform the concept of “good governance” into the epithet of a “nanny state.” Freed of any superego guardrails, they would dispense with the rule of law like a band of Bolsheviks bent on imposing the will of a minority.

Before the rise of social media, the increased availability of sophisticated firearms, and the deregulation of finance, democracy could have held off against these wealthy gunslingers. It could have been saved by the equivalent of the Magnificent Seven—Edward R. Murrow, Martin Luther King, Jr., Fanny Lou Hamer, Barbara Jordan, Frank Church, Cesar Chavez, Marian Anderson or some other combination of heroes—riding into town and disarming the bad guys.

Today, seven is not enough. What’s needed now, at minimum, is the Magnificent Millions. To save democracy in Moldova, Georgia, and elsewhere, only a boisterous majority of the voting population can effectively counter the handful of Bilious Billionaires.

This piece was originally published in Foreign Policy in Focus.