Ahem. We're talking about a country where a chancellor that pushed for building a gas pipeline from a foreign country went straight to the board of the foreign company running that pipeline after ending his term as chancellor.
Corruption is everywhere, it's just on different levels. Usually in more "developed" (I don't like that word) countries you see corruption on the highest levels, and people actually get away with it.
The way you word it makes it sound like "the corruption in developing countries is low-level, whereas in developed countries it's high-level". In reality, the corruption in developing countries is on all levels, whereas it's mostly only happening at a higher level in developing countries.
I wouldn't say so. To get the appropriate doctor to check my brother's broken arm and shoulder sooner than in more than a month (he needed surgery within 3 weeks max to avoid permanent damage) we had to employ personal contacts and gifts. I live in EU and this happened this summer.
It is another league, not like back home in Portugal, where everyone does everyone little "favours", you cannot even get into some hospitals without a little help.
That's just run-of-the-mill corruption like you would find anywhere else. Every country has this. Politicians will be politicians.
It hardly supports the thesis above. Germany is not rotten to the core by corruption. It's not a constant hindrance to someone trying to get things done.
> We're talking about a country where a chancellor that pushed for building a gas pipeline from a foreign country went straight to the board of the foreign company running that pipeline after ending his term as chancellor.
Yeah, and long after that they decided to build a second pipeline (Nord Stream 2).
And before that, they've been received the same gas from the same foreign company over the ex-SU Ukrainian pipelines.
And five years later we will likely see Turkish pipelines (still bearing Russian gas) prolonged to Hungary, from where it will reach Germany once again.
And that foreign company isn't even running those Nord Stream pipelines - they were largely German, due to legislations requiring separation of the pipeline operator and the supplier.
Don't underestimate how much Germany had profited from all the cheap gas and infrastructure investments from the said foreign country, up until they managed to loose it all just for the sake of political appearance and no real substantial win.
I wonder if we would some day see Scholz in some American LNG company for which the nation now has to pay order of magnitude more, than it ever paid to Russia.
Corruption is everywhere, it's just on different levels. Usually in more "developed" (I don't like that word) countries you see corruption on the highest levels, and people actually get away with it.