How to Jail Your Predecessor
In the grand, occasionally farcical theater of democracy, the peaceful transfer of power is supposed to be the dignified final act. Lately, however, it’s looking more like the bloody beginning of a revenge tragedy. Welcome to the new favorite pastime of incoming governments, a phenomenon we’ll call regime change politics: using the justice system to go after the folks who just lost the election. This maneuver presents what we might call the “Accountability Paradox”—that tricky spot where the noble quest to hold the powerful accountable looks suspiciously like a back-alley political shivving.
The weapon of choice is “lawfare,” the art of using the legal system to delegitimize, bankrupt, or otherwise ruin your opponent. It’s war by other means, where the sharpest things flying are subpoenas, not shrapnel. The beauty of this strategy is that it’s almost always gift-wrapped in the noble cause of “anti-corruption.” And who doesn’t hate corruption? A new regime can take the very real, very smelly corruption of the previous administration and use it as a pretext for a highly selective witch hunt, targeting their loudest rivals while conveniently ignoring the skeletons in their allies’ closets. This “politicization of anti-corruption” is a masterstroke, allowing the new boss to pursue purely political goals under a banner of unimpeachable virtue.
But here’s the rub: while these crusades might start with cheering crowds, they often end by pouring gasoline on the fires of political polarization, making the public so cynical that they trust lawyers even less than politicians. The result isn’t a cleaner government, but a weaker one, where the rule of law is seen as just another toy for the powerful.
The Anatomy of Lawfare
Turning a nation’s legal system into a political weapon isn’t an act of passion; it’s a cold, calculated strategy. It requires specific tactics, a vulnerable institutional setup, and a flair for the dramatic. You don’t just wake up one day and decide to sue your political enemies into oblivion. It’s a process, a craft, really. The public prosecutor’s office, with its god-like power to investigate and indict, is the natural ground zero for any respectable lawfare campaign. Sometimes, the politicization is laughably direct. More often, it’s a subtler dance. In places like South Korea, the whole prosecutorial career ladder is built on pleasing the higher-ups, who just so happen to be political appointees. This creates a culture where ambitious prosecutors know that the path to a corner office is paved with the political corpses of the ruling party’s enemies.
Lawfare is, above all, a public relations war. The strategic leak of a juicy tidbit from an investigation, the breathless media coverage, the carefully orchestrated public outrage—these are as crucial as any legal argument. The goal is to have your target tried and convicted on the evening news long before they ever see a jury. The whole enterprise works best when you can exploit the fuzzy, ill-defined parts of the law. The most effective charges aren’t for something as clear-cut as taking a suitcase full of cash, but for wonderfully vague offenses like “abuse of power,” the charge du jour used against former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. Such laws are a prosecutor’s dream, granting them enormous discretion to frame almost any political decision as a criminal act.
Cautionary Tales from the Global Arena
This isn’t just theory. The playbook for using the courts to take out a political rival has been tested in democracies around the world, with spectacularly messy results.
Brazil: The Anti-Corruption Blockbuster That Bombed
Brazil’s Operation Car Wash (Operação Lava Jato) is a morality play that started as an anti-corruption epic and ended as a dark comedy about how to accidentally wreck a democracy. Launched in 2014, it uncovered a corruption scheme so vast it made your average scandal look like petty shoplifting. For a while, it was a glorious spectacle. The operation was hailed as proof that Brazil was finally done with its culture of impunity. The operation’s white whale was former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. In 2017, the crusade’s celebrity judge, Sérgio Moro, convicted Lula of corruption, knocking the front-runner out of the 2018 presidential race. From day one, Lula and his supporters screamed that it was a textbook case of “lawfare.” The heroic narrative took a nosedive in 2019 when The Intercept Brasil published the “Vaza Jato” (Car Wash Leaks). A hacker had gotten their hands on a treasure trove of communications between Judge Moro and the prosecutors. The leaks were a bombshell, showing Moro acting less like an impartial judge and more like the prosecution’s coach, suggesting strategies and feeding them leads. In 2021, Brazil’s Supreme Court had seen enough, annulling Lula’s conviction and ruling that Judge Moro had been biased. The hangover from the Car Wash party has been brutal. Its holy-roller methods discredited the entire political class, shattered public faith in the justice system, and paved the way for the rise of far-right populist Jair Bolsonaro—who promptly appointed Judge Moro as his Minister of Justice.
South Korea: The Presidency-to-Prison Pipeline
If you’re looking for a country that has truly perfected the art of the post-presidential prosecution, look no further than South Korea. Here, leaving office is less a transition into respected statesmanship and more a prelude to a perp walk. Since South Korea embraced democracy in 1987, the path from the presidential Blue House to the courthouse has become a well-trodden one in a cycle of “political revenge.” Former president Lee Myung-bak? Jailed for bribery. His successor, Park Geun-hye? Impeached and imprisoned for corruption. The next guy, Moon Jae-in? Indicted. The cycle reached its karmic peak in 2024 with the impeachment of President Yoon Suk Yeol—a former prosecutor who built his career putting other presidents in jail. It seems the sword of justice in South Korea is a boomerang.
The Democratic Dilemma
Here we arrive at the central, painful dilemma. Holding leaders accountable is the bedrock of democracy. But when the tools of accountability are turned into weapons of political warfare, they do more damage to the democratic house than the corruption ever did. It’s like trying to fix a leaky faucet with a sledgehammer. The damage from these legal battles seeps into the foundations of the state itself. The most significant consequence is the collapse of public trust, not only in politicians but in the core institutions of the state. In South Korea, the endless cycle of prosecutions has left the public deeply cynical about both its leaders and its courts. In Ukraine, trust in the courts plummeted to single digits under the Yanukovych regime and has only recovered modestly; a 2024 survey showed 60% of Ukrainians still don’t trust their own Supreme Court. Politicized prosecutions also act as an accelerant for partisan division, turning political opponents into mortal enemies who must be jailed, not just defeated. This makes compromise impossible. In Argentina, convicting Cristina Kirchner didn’t end the debate; it just made both sides dig their trenches deeper, locking the country in a state of permanent political warfare. This kind of decay creates the perfect opening for an authoritarian strongman to stride in, promising to clean up the mess by getting rid of all that messy democratic nonsense.
Putting the Genie Back in the Bottle
The weaponization of justice is one of the slickest, most dangerous threats to democracy going. It’s a high-risk game that, even when “won,” leaves the entire political system weaker, more divided, and drowning in cynicism. Once the cycle of revenge gets going, it’s devilishly hard to stop. Breaking this cycle isn’t about finding a more clever legal trick; it’s about rebuilding the firewalls that are supposed to keep politics and justice in their separate corners. For governments, this means building a wall between the executive branch and the prosecutor’s office, making appointments transparent and bipartisan, and repealing vague laws like “abuse of power.” For civil society, it means supporting a free press that exposes both corruption and prosecutorial bias. For the international community, it means demanding fair justice systems, not just anti-corruption laws.
Ultimately, the goal is to create a global norm where using the courts to settle political scores is seen for what it is: a cheap, dirty, and profoundly undemocratic trick. But what happens when this cycle of political revenge, perfected in democracies around the world, finally comes home to roost in the world’s oldest and most powerful constitutional republic? What happens when the fire department shows up with a flamethrower?
That is a question for our next analysis.
Coming soon: Anatomy of a Political Bombshell, Part II: The Detonation
