Whoever Gets the Last Government Contract, Turn Out the Lights.

Dictators share an occupational disease: they think they hold the title deed to the country. After a while, they start treating the budget as a family bank account, public institutions as their HR department, and the citizen as an irritating accountant whose job is to cover the expenses. Ask “Where did the money go?” and you discover just how sensitive they are. The nerve! Demanding answers from the landlord? Sorry, darling. You’re a tenant.

Academic literature has names for this arrangement. Using public power for private gain is corruption; bending rules and institutions to serve particular interests is state capture. With the latter, the problem isn’t simply money disappearing from the safe. It’s the same circle controlling the key, the auditor, and the operating manual. At the advanced level of robbery, you no longer need to break down the door. You write into law which relative it opens for.

The World Bank identifies state capture as a form of corruption that can carry some of the heaviest economic costs.

In Tunisia, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s circle developed a particularly sophisticated version. Research by Rijkers, Freund, and Nucifora showed how companies connected to his family benefited from regulation. According to findings reported by the World Bank, those companies captured roughly 21 percent of the country’s net private-sector profits. They hadn’t built a family business. They’d put the country inside one. Other people became entrepreneurs. These people owned the entrance.

Then what happened? Following mass protests, Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia on January 14, 2011. After twenty-four years in power, he discovered that public office was a temporary job serving the country—and that the exit applied to him, too. But his departure didn’t erase every trace of the networks of privilege. Later World Bank assessments noted that regime change did not automatically end state capture. The boss leaving doesn’t close the company. Sometimes they just change the letterhead.

We also need to look at how authoritarian governments rot from within. Because in that picture of unity and solidarity, not everyone is hugging. Some are conducting a pat-down. Political science calls the distribution of resources, positions, and opportunities in exchange for political support patronage. In plain English, the state becomes an all-you-can-eat buffet for selected guests. The citizen is at the door asking how much it costs. Inside, they’re on their third plate. And the person at the door is paying.

Under this system, “Can they do the job?” gradually becomes irrelevant. The question is “Whose man are they?” A CV is unnecessary paperwork anyway. Put down your surname, then list whose hand you kiss at family celebrations under “References.” You don’t have twenty years of experience, but you are the right person’s brother-in-law. What more do we need? We can’t leave the country in the hands of strangers.

The trouble is, this arrangement gets expensive. There are more mouths to feed, and expectations rise. Yesterday, a position was enough. Today, they want a government contract. Get the contract, want the land. Get the land, want planning permission. Eventually, inviting a relative over for breakfast turns into feeding them three meals a day. You bring out the eggs; they demand the title deed to the chicken. And because everyone orbiting the government has needs that qualify as “a matter of national importance,” the expenses never end. Citizens’ wages cause inflation. Everything these people acquire creates jobs. By some divine economic miracle, a poor person buying cheese wrecks the economy, while their third villa brings it back to life.

But there may not be enough cake to go around. Or the cake gets bigger, and those at the top simply get bigger plates. Old partners receive less; new favourites receive more. Suddenly, principles nobody has seen for years make an appearance. Transparency, merit, justice… They had them all along. One contract goes to another company and the man’s inner Montesquieu awakens.

Yesterday, it was “We stand with our government.” Today, it’s “There are serious institutional problems.” The date those problems began is remarkably precise: the Tuesday he was removed from the board. That’s why internal power struggles aren’t always about differences of opinion. Sometimes the argument is over which faction gets to control public resources. It sounds like an ideological debate. Listen closely and you can hear the card machine beeping.

Positions aren’t sought merely to get things done, either. They’re sought to keep the rival faction out. If an institution has five appointments to make, what the institution actually needs comes sixth on the agenda. First, two for us, two for you, one for the big man… The institution isn’t functioning? Hire another press adviser to explain that it is. And so loyalty replaces competence. The person who knows the job but raises objections leaves; the person who knows nothing but nods at the correct angle stays. Then everyone asks, “Why did this institution collapse?” Because you didn’t appoint a director. You installed a motion-activated applause machine. Where people are punished for delivering bad news, only good news reaches the leader. The economy is magnificent, the public is delighted, every project is soaring. If the man learns supermarket prices from a PowerPoint presentation, of course he sees no problems. You fired the person who told him what tomatoes cost. Their replacement explains how patriotic the tomatoes are.

Eventually, the leader may mistake his own propaganda broadcasts for real life. Everyone loves him, everyone believes in him, everyone wants another term. Every respondent in the poll was appointed by him. The polling company is called His Private Office. But the internal struggle isn’t only about acquiring more. Eventually, protecting what has already been acquired becomes an issue. What happens if the privileges are examined? If past decisions are investigated, who protects whom? Whose files will the successor open? What looks like comradeship in a shared cause may also contain mutual fear. The man isn’t upset about losing his friend. He’s terrified of losing control over what his friend knows. They stand shoulder to shoulder in photographs, but keep their archives in separate locations.

A weakening leader, or uncertainty over who comes next, can intensify the struggle. Everyone claims to be thinking about the country’s future. By an extraordinary coincidence, that future always requires them to be in charge. Plenty of volunteers to save the nation. Nobody volunteering to hand things over to an independent auditor.

Then the thought begins to circulate that the government might not last forever. That’s when certain loyalties are recalculated. The people who said “We’re behind him to the very end” start checking where the end is. Those who once trampled each other to get into the front row now act as though they wandered into the photograph by accident.

“I wasn’t even at that meeting.”

There’s a photograph of you.

“Not ideologically.”

Suddenly, a figure who wielded power for years declares himself technical support. He gave no orders, implemented nothing, knew nothing. The man who spent twenty years telling us he ran the country has been downgraded overnight to operating the photocopier.

Of course, not every internal dispute brings down a government. A leader can purge rivals, redistribute resources, and bring partners back into the fold. So we shouldn’t applaud every falling-out as a collapse. Sometimes that enormous crash isn’t the regime coming down. They’re just putting out another table for the banquet.

But a system sustained by patronage can struggle to carry its own weight when it can no longer keep its partners satisfied. People who have preached patience to the public for years become remarkably impatient when their own share shrinks. Delay a payment owed to the man who tells citizens to “Be grateful” by two weeks, and he discovers his inner trade unionist.

In these systems, the real political crisis of belt-tightening begins when the belt finally goes around the waist of someone at the government’s table.

In Romania, Nicolae Ceaușescu’s rule collapsed during the uprising of December 1989. On December 22, he and his wife fled Bucharest by helicopter. There is a bitter historical irony in a man who spent years believing he was above the country ending up literally above it, looking for somewhere to stay. The lesson is not to applaud violent endings. It is to understand the difference between appearing on state television and having public support. You can fill the screen. You can’t fill the legitimacy gap the same way. Meanwhile, the public is filling up with rather different feelings.

In Chile, Augusto Pinochet faced the ballot box. “No” won 54.7 percent in the 1988 referendum, setting in motion a process that led to elections and his handing over the presidency in March 1990. So there isn’t a helicopter waiting at every historical exit. Sometimes there are organised citizens, an opposition, and votes that are defended. The public’s answer to a ruler asking for another eight years was perfectly clear: we’re pulling the plug on your extension.

But taking comfort in “History eventually erases them all” is excessively optimistic. In the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos’s rule ended with the popular uprising of 1986. A special commission was then established to recover the ill-gotten wealth of his family and associates. Yet his son, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., was elected president in 2022. Apparently, history sometimes puts down the eraser and reopens the same file as a “new version.” Where collective memory leaves a blank, a family album can move in. We need to understand how collective memory ends up suffering from amnesia, too.

The European Commission’s 2025 Türkiye Report says the country’s record on corruption investigations, prosecutions, and convictions requires substantial improvement. It highlights expanding exemptions in public procurement, transparency problems, and excessive use of negotiated procedures. According to the report, only 39.7 percent of the public procurement market by value was open to fair competition in 2024. That does not mean every remaining transaction was corrupt. It shows how much public spending took place under restricted competition. When public money is involved, “Trust us” is not an auditing method. Typing “Our intentions are pure” into the accounting software won’t fix the balance sheet.

Human Rights Watch’s 2026 assessment of Türkiye also says repression of the opposition threatens freedom of political association and free and fair elections. In such an environment, the issue isn’t simply how much money is spent. It is how free people and institutions are to demand an account of it. When public spending is defended in the name of the government’s prestige while a citizen’s objection is treated as a threat, you have a peculiar approach to customer service: the customer pays the bill, then gets thrown out of the restaurant for complaining.

That is the real arrogance behind the reckless use of public resources. A service financed by taxpayers is presented as a personal gift from those in power. The citizen puts money in the till, then is expected to applaud at the opening ceremony. Someone else blows out the candles on a cake you paid for and tells you to be grateful. And the next invoice includes the cake’s promotional film.

So how do these governments go? There is no single formula. Historical examples show different combinations of mass protest, elections, economic and political crises, and fractures within the ruling coalition. Exposing corruption does not automatically bring an ending, either. Information must circulate, people must be able to organise, and mechanisms of accountability must work. History does not do the citizens’ opposition work for them. Waiting around because “They’ll go eventually” is like expecting the damp in your walls to serve your landlord an eviction notice.

More importantly, a leader leaving and democracy arriving are not