The world’s richest man is trying to buy the US presidential election to present it as a burnt offering to his preferred candidate.

Multi-billionaire Elon Musk isn’t just making money 75 million dollars of his own money He joined Donald Trump’s campaign. Now offering payments to voters in swing states In the form of “lottery” Even if this doesn’t violate U.S. election laws, it falls outside of this situation. Starting at $47 for registered voters in Pennsylvania who approve their petition online became a million dollars a day to one lucky signer in a swing state between now and the election. Federal law prohibits such incentives to register to vote, but the penalty (for Musk) is minimal and, in any case, will not be assessed until after the election.

In other words, a billionaire did everything to support a billionaire on behalf of billionaires around the world.

This billionaires-on-billionaires approach certainly has precedents in the United States. Right-wing plutocrats rallied behind famous Mitt Romney In the 2012 presidential election. But what billionaires really have their eye on is Trump. Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam, for example, were key donors in Trump’s previous elections. Trump’s current transition co-chairman, Howard Lutnick, is a billionaire financier.

There is a similarly blatant election buying effort in Moldova. In this small country stuck between Ukraine and Romania, billionaire Ilan Shor 15 million dollars were sent to 130 thousand citizens In exchange for a promise to vote against pro-EU leader Maia Sandu and a referendum to include the goal of EU membership in the country’s constitution. With a particularly unappetizing form of return, part of that salary billion dollars The money Shor stole from three Moldovan banks in 2014.

Actually, it’s a “robbery”.

Half of Moldova voted in this critical election. Some went to the polls thinking that their salaries would be paid immediately. According to BBC:

A BBC producer heard a woman who dropped her ballot paper into the clear box ask an election observer where she would get paid. When we asked him directly if he had been offered cash to vote, he accepted it without hesitation. She was angry that the man who sent her to the polling station was no longer returning her calls. “He tricked me!” he said.

It’s not just you, dear.

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

Two elections this month in the former Soviet region – in Moldova and Georgia – reveal this battle between wealth and the state. Russian-allied kleptocrats are pitted against pro-European democrats to see which way the post-Soviet space will turn. Of course, Ukraine is waging a real war on exactly these battle lines.

The Ukraine scenario is the ultimate threat even here in the United States. Democracy can defeat billionaires in the elections of the USA, Moldova and Georgia. But these will be Pyrrhusian victories if the countries involved engage in an armed conflict of the kind Ukraine is currently experiencing.

Why is Moldova Important?

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

It could be Moldova.

In the early 1990s, a thin section 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 widely spoken than Romanian, emerged from a ceasefire agreement and Russian “peacekeepers” are required to maintain the tenuous status quo. No UN member state recognizes the “country” of Transnistria, and no legitimate government appreciates the separatist region’s anachronistic commitment to its Soviet past and its current resolve. organized crime.

The Moldovan government is facing another potential separatist movement from the Gagauz people, who speak the Turkic language and whose nationalism aligns them with the Kremlin. Russian leader Vladimir Putin developed close relations with Gagauz leader Evgenia Gutul in order to introduce a new one to Moldova.

In addition to supporting separatist movements, the Kremlin has launched other efforts to destabilize Moldova and reincorporate it into Russia. Russia in 2023, according to the Moldovan government directed cyber attacks and fake bomb threats in the country. Even while Russia is fighting in Ukraine planned a coup Overthrow the pro-EU government of Maia Sandu. Western governments I warned Sandu Expect more of the same if re-elected.

Ukraine is currently trying to prevent the expansion of the Russian empire and the consolidation of an illiberal region on the edge of Europe. It has long wanted to join the European Union. Russia first seized Ukrainian territory in 2014 to reject this offer.

Now it’s Moldova’s turn to risk Russia’s wrath by turning to the West. Moldova’s future course will show whether Putin’s liberalism or the EU’s liberalism prevails in the region.

Meanwhile in Georgia

Another country, another billionaire, a new challenge to democracy.

In Georgia, billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili is the country’s richest person and the founder of the current ruling party, Georgia Dream. Like Ilan Shor and Ivanishvili Parrots on the Kremlin line He said voters should not take their countries to war with Russia by approaching the EU. Toward this end, the Georgia Dream government—despite the objections of its own opposition president—enacted a law modeled on Russia’s foreign agents law to reduce the influence of foreign (read: Western) organizations on the country’s politics. But what such laws actually do is reduce the influence of independent and dissenting voices inside country. Iskra Kirova of Human Rights Watch explains:

Branding independent civil society, the media, and other dissenting voices as “Trojan horses,” “foreign agent” laws provided a convenient framework for delegitimizing and isolating them. They also helped impose strict monitoring and reporting requirements and keep critics out of public life. As promotion of democratic practices and human rights threatens authoritarians’ grip on power, “foreign agent” laws provide a useful tool to discredit these activities by equating them with defense of the interests of a foreign power.

Such laws have stalled Georgia’s EU accession process.

The election choice next weekend will be as stark as the one in Moldova: Will voters reject the Kremlin or the EU? Georgia, like Moldova, is a divided country with two breakaway regions (South Ossetia and Abkhazia) that enjoy Russian support. It is not difficult to imagine a Ukrainian scenario for this country.

Current president Salome Zourabichvili is trying to unite the opposition against Ivanishvili’s Georgian Dream. But unlike Maia Sandu, she doesn’t have much power to resist the money and manipulation of one rich man. It takes more than just nice words to defeat billionaires.

From Democracy to Oligarchy

Billionaires are a trump card that can subvert democracy by capitalizing on some people’s dreams of acquiring enormous wealth, becoming famous, and breaking the law with impunity. But after billionaires win become law. As in Russia, oligarchs cooperate with the ruling party, turning politics into patronage and the economy into outright theft.

They don’t have to break the law to do this: they to do law.

In the United States, such an oligarchy is very similar to the course of the evilly named X. An administration bought and paid for by Musk, and responding with lucrative contracts and tax cuts, will impose its own definition of “free speech.” By deplatforming (or imprisoning) all insolent journalists. This would deregulate government by laying off much of the civil service, removing all restrictions on power and accountability. And he would pretend to run the economy like a business while accumulating debt.

This is what happens when childish oligarchs are allowed to fully reveal their identities. This was the single “greatest” contribution to the politics of the Muskites; somehow transforming the concept of “good governance” into the adjective of “nanny state”. Freed from any superego guardrails, they would abandon the rule of law like a mob of Bolsheviks bent on imposing the will of the few.

Before the rise of social media, the increased availability of advanced firearms, and the deregulation of finance, democracy could hold its own against these wealthy gunslingers. He could be saved by the equivalent of the Magnificent Seven who came to town (Edward R. Murrow, Martin Luther King, Jr., Fanny Lou Hamer, Barbara Jordan, Frank Church, Cesar Chavez, Marian Anderson, or some other combination of heroes). and we disarm the bad guys.

Seven is not enough today. What’s needed now is at least The Magnificent Millions. To save democracy in Moldova, Georgia and elsewhere, only a loud majority of the voting population can effectively oppose a handful of Bilious Billionaires.