The Stolen Wallet

Long before the pandemic, I was on a media tour across the United States warning — wherever I could — about the rising tide of Latin American populism then gaining strength in governments that still wore the veneer of democracy. It was not a phenomenon I had discovered casually; I’d followed it for years. In Florida, on Spanish-language media, both Univisión and the irreverent Jaime Bayly asked the same question: “What is populism’s best friend and worst enemy?”The truthful, if uncomfortable, answer was: the best friend of populism is corruption; its worst enemy is education.

Eight years have passed, and that formula — the combination of corruption and educational decline — too closely resembles the political trajectory of Spain’s Socialist government today. Just as in Latin America, where socialist-tinged regimes became synonymous with systemic corruption, scandal after scandal now dominates headlines in Spain, while formal denials from the top grow ever more strained and implausible.

Pedro Sánchez, on returning to the media after a tense holiday, insists with a stony face that he has never been involved in anything resembling corruption. His political resilience — his ability to shrug off contradiction after contradiction — is indeed remarkable. He seems capable of digesting every attack as though his stomach were made of granite, repeating that he is cold even as flames encircle him.

But while corruption is noisy, visible, and scandalous, it is only the spectacle of populist politics. The darker, longer-term threat is something quieter: the systematic erosion of education as a pillar of social autonomy. In classic populist schemes, being well educated no longer translates into better job opportunities or future competitiveness; instead, citizens become clients of the state, dependent and compliant. Those who excel academically often emigrate, leaving behind a society more susceptible to political manipulation and less equipped to challenge power with informed critique.

In Venezuela, for example, the state hollowed out public education and replaced it with ideological indoctrination traded for basic sustenance. In Argentina, a once-vibrant intellectual culture faded under decades of politicised schooling. These are not isolated anecdotes, but patterns of how populist politics operate: corruption buys political actors; deseducation manufactures obedience.

What happens when a society’s educational capital is systematically stripped away? It loses not just skill and knowledge, but its ability to think critically, distinguish rights from privileges, and resist manipulation. While the public debates the latest corruption scandal — the “wallet stolen” in plain view — the deeper theft is more sinister: the collective inheritance of future generations. The stolen wallet is not merely cash; it is the purse of education, opportunity, and the intellectual resources needed to question power rather than merely watch it.

In this sense, populist governments cultivate a double illusion: they dazzle with corruption as spectacle while despoiling the educational foundations that make resistance possible. And once a society abandons its capacity for protest, critique, and civic resistance, the terrain becomes fertile for accepting the intolerable as normal.

The greatest theft these regimes commit, then, is not the theft of envelopes, contracts, or banknotes — it is the theft of the wallet that contains the future itself: education. Corruption may be the bright flame that distracts our attention, but in the shadows they are emptying the place where hope and possibility are stored.