Weak leadership still clouds East Europe success

PRAGUE (Reuters) - The collapse of communism may have changed the face of eastern Europe but the region remains blighted by corruption and poor governance, lacking the strong institutions and leaders essential to a healthy society.

Dictatorships across the region collapsed like a house of cards along with the November 1989 breach of the Berlin Wall. Poles, Czechs, Hungarians and others quickly embraced the newly found freedom to vote in fair elections, participate in public life, travel and do business.

Economic progress, aided by foreign investment and EU entry in 2004-2007, was rapid though uneven around the region. Some of the region's capital cities, such as Prague or Budapest, have income high above the EU average.

Democracy has taken root, drawing in countries like the Czech Republic, on pre-communist traditions. However, in political leadership, the civil service and judiciary progress has been hampered by the tenacity of old ideas and the old bureaucrats and officials who grew up with them.

This suggests the communist era damaged and deformed the nations' elites deeper than it seemed when the Berlin Wall fell.

Vaclav Havel, the former dissident jailed for years by the Communists before he became Czechoslovak president in 1989, said cleaning up politics was much further off than he had thought.

"I admit I was deeply mistaken when I thought this would come sooner. This really is a task for decades," he told reporters recently.

In Hungary, fiscally irresponsible governments led the country to the brink of bankruptcy when the global crisis hit last year, and Hungarians have grown harshly skeptical.

HIGHER EXPECTATIONS

A Eurobarometer poll published in February showed that Hungary was the only EU country where more people believed that the overall situation in the region was better before the 1989 changes, although Latvia and Bulgaria came close behind.

"Twenty years have passed, and the dominant majority of the Hungarian population regards these two decades as the era of disappointment," Peter Hack, a former leading liberal politician, wrote in an article that sparked lively debate.

"Despite several successes, the regime change has failed. It has failed because it has not created the more liveable country which we desired so much 20 years ago."

For the last 25 years of Communist rule, Hungarians enjoyed a privileged position in the Soviet bloc. Their liberal "Goulash Communism," following harsh 1950s repressions, offered a life more comfortable than that in Moscow, Warsaw or Prague. These days, Hungarians compare Budapest with Paris, Berlin or London.

Bulgaria has in some ways shown the reverse side of the transformation. The EU has repeatedly frozen billions of euros in aid since its 2007 EU entry due to corruption. Diplomats complain that organized crime pervades state institutions and reaches into the highest levels of government.

Aviezer Tucker, a philosopher researching totalitarianism, said communism was more effective than other authoritarian orders, such as Spain's Franco, in eradicating dissent and destroying institutions that form the web of a democratic society.

When communism collapsed, the elites that could take over were very narrow. Many from the former ruling circles stayed in charge, and with them graft and poor practice persisted.

That leads to a situation where "police do not investigate, the prosecutors do not prosecute and the judges do not convict members of the current or former communist political elites. The rule of law is weak," Tucker said.

Global chains like Starbucks and McDonalds have replaced grubby kiosks and countries around the region have cleaned up their rivers and air. Shiny skyscrapers have appeared in Warsaw.

But a survey conducted by the CBOS pollster in April showed 89 percent of Poles saw corruption was a big problem and only 14 percent thought it had been decreasing from over recent years.

"Most Poles feel that, regardless of who they vote for, all politicians equally take bribes and focus on themselves rather than on ruling the country once elected," said Jaroslaw Zbieranek, expert on democratic institutions at the Institute of Public Affairs think-tank based in Warsaw.

A NEW ELITE "This is the major problem here -- to rebuild the political elites by gradually introducing young people, who were not brought up or educated under communism," said Zbieranek.

Apart from graft, governments from the region have often puzzled western counterparts by messy politics.

Squabbling in the Czech Republic, understood by few abroad, toppled the government this year in the middle of the country's term as EU president, damaging its reputation at a time when it was in the international spotlight.

Polish President Lech Kaczynski irritated Germany by bringing up the number of Poles killed in World War Two as an argument to get more voting power in the EU. Diplomats also remember a clash between the president and the prime minister over who could take the government plane to an EU summit.

In Slovakia, the ruling coalition of Robert Fico -- a former communist who once said that he did not even notice the changes of 1989 -- includes former strongman Vladimir Meciar and a nationalist party whose boss had once called for Slovaks to mount tanks and ride into neighboring Hungary.

West European politicians are no saints and a number have been called to account in the courts. But legal battles are quite rare in central and eastern Europe where very few politicians have been tried for abuses of office.

Slovenia is the least corrupt ex-communist country in Europe in rankings by Transparency International, a non-government group monitoring graft. But it is still behind 11 of the 15 countries that were EU members before the union enlarged to the east.

The bottom of the table within the EU is firmly occupied by the new members, with Bulgaria and Romania ranked lowest. Hungary and Bulgaria have slid back in recent years.

Some analysts such as Robin Shepherd, director of international affairs at the London-based Henry Jackson Society, believe, though, that the glass is much more full than empty and the growing pains of democracies should not be overplayed.

"Generally things have gone very well in CEE (Central and Eastern Europe) and if there is still much to do that does not necessarily mean that western Europe is an appropriate model from here on out," he said.

But Havel sees the chance only in the grandchildren of people who are around 50, because their already adult offspring are still tainted by being brought up in the shade of communism.

"Sooner or later the moment will come when children of these children will start joining public life, and my hope is that then public life will be thoroughly illuminated."

(Additional reporting Sandor Peto in Budapest and Gabriela Baczynska in Warsaw)

(Editing by Ralph Boulton)