Wanted: Moral authority

In his two decades in politics, Václav Klaus rarely addressed corruption. When he did, it was often in the context of the EU. He told Týden last Sept. that EU funding is the No. 1 corruption phenomenon. It is strange money used for strange things, he said. In his farewell speech as president last week, he said that the way to reduce corruption is to cut back on redistribution on both the national and EU level. This is no doubt true, but not even this would eliminate any theoretical corruption in the application of amnesty/remission. (And it is lingering suspicions of this by the public that prompted Klaus to mention corruption in his final speech in the first place.) Nor would reducing redistribution address corruption in the private sector, which Jan Spáčil of Deloitte Legal said is just as widespread as in the public sector. No, what the CR needs most is a moral authority whose actions and words set an example for others. Neither of the CR's two past presidents was a perfect role model in this respect. Let's hope the third time is the charm.