In Spain, new political forces have been challenging the scandal-plagued traditional parties and promising to fight corruption. But another new arrival, the Money Party, is taking a very different approach.
“We are corrupt, let’s not deny it,” reads its manifesto. “We bribe, we embezzle, we put our friends in public posts, we help construction companies, we get paid under the table, we don’t pay taxes – the usual stuff.”
It should be pointed out that the Money Party is fictional. The brainchild of three young entrepreneurs from the northwestern city of Ourense, it is at the heart of the game they have created, Corrupt Mayor Clicker.
The player takes on the role of the eponymous politician and is required to hoard as many ill-gotten funds as possible in a Swiss bank account.
Shady deals
The mayor has to pick up the shadiest contracts he can throughout the game. He can get extra money by answering ethically dubious questions, such as: “There are rumours that the tax office is after you and we don’t want them to discover your business. Do you a) Hide the dodgy cash; or b) Try to bribe the tax authorities?”
"The idea was to tackle the corruption issue with irony and humour," says Xabier Rosada, who created the game with his friends Javier López and José Antonio Tesoiro. Launched in May, it has had 100,000 downloads so far.
The trio, all in their mid-20s, were inspired by the seemingly endless series of corruption cases that have hit Spain’s main political parties over the last half-decade.
Scandal over breakfast
These have included the funnelling off of millions of euro from a fund set up by the Socialists supposedly to help companies in crisis in
Andalusia
; allegations that the governing Popular Party ran a cash fund for its senior politicians financed by corporate bribes; and the arrest earlier this year of
Rodrigo Rato
, a former minister for the economy and managing director of the
International Monetary Fund
.
“Each day, you’d wake up and while having breakfast you’d see another scandal, and another, and another. So we’d talk about it and laugh about it and that’s how the idea came about,” Mr Rosada said.
He is outraged by Spain’s corruption crisis, but insistsit’s best to look at it with a sense of humour, “because if not, you’d just look at the sheer quantity of money being stolen and you’d go nuts”.
Almost all of the corrupt scenarios that feature in Corrupt Mayor Clicker are based on real life, from kickbacks for housing projects to the building of airports nobody uses.
“There is corruption in every country,” Mr Rosada says. “But there’s more in Spain.”
