By the time a year crawls toward its last page, publications feel the ritual itch; crown a person, an event, a moment that “defined” the months we survived. It’s a harmless tradition when history is polite. But 2025 was not polite. It was blunt. It was loud. And it had no interest in symbolism. If you insist on naming the thing that marked this year, scratched into every capital, every battlefield, every budget spreadsheet, every smiling press conference, call it what it was: corruption, exposed and emboldened.
Yes, the usual suspects were waiting in line. Donald Trump haunts headlines like a rerun nobody asked for, a reminder that politics can become a reality show with nuclear codes. The war in Ukraine remains a grinding, obscene wound, proving that cruelty scales well when funded properly. Pick up almost any “Year in Review” and you’ll find those names polished and framed. But they are symptoms, not the disease. Corruption is the connective tissue. It is the language everyone speaks fluently while pretending not to understand.
In 2025 corruption stopped bothering with subtlety. It stopped whispering in corridors and leaned comfortably into microphones. It learned that accountability is optional, consequences negotiable and public outrage a renewable resource that exhausts itself faster than power ever does. From the White House to the Ukrainian front, from El Salvador to Japan, corruption didn’t just happen, it strutted.
Let’s get something straight: corruption is not just brown envelopes and offshore accounts. That’s the cartoon version, the one we show students so we can pretend the problem is solvable with a few arrests. Real corruption in 2025 wore better suits. It arrived as “policy,” “security,” “economic necessity,” “national interest.” It justified itself with think tanks and legal teams. It wrapped itself in flags and emergency language and dared anyone to object without being labelled naïve, unpatriotic, or dangerous.
War made this easier. War always does. Ukraine’s suffering is real and immense, and that reality has been exploited ruthlessly. Where there is urgency, there is opacity. Where there is fear, there is profit. Billions move quickly when bombs are falling, and nobody asks too many questions when the word “existential” is stamped on every decision. Corruption doesn’t care which side of a border it’s on; it only cares that the border exists. It feeds on reconstruction contracts, weapons procurement, aid pipelines, and the moral shield of “now is not the time.”
Meanwhile, democracies congratulated themselves for being better than the alternatives while quietly hollowing out their own credibility. In 2025, transparency became a branding exercise. Ethics committees became decorative furniture. Politicians learned they could survive scandals as long as they controlled the tempo of outrage. Apologize badly, deny reflexively, counterattack aggressively, wait it out. The cycle is now muscle memory.
Authoritarian regimes, of course, didn’t bother with the pretence. El Salvador’s strongman aesthetics, order over law, spectacle over justice, continued to sell the fantasy that corruption is acceptable if it’s efficient. Japan, long allergic to public scandal, reminded us that corruption doesn’t need chaos to thrive; it can live quietly inside consensus, seniority, and institutional silence. Different styles, same rot.
And then there’s the global marketplace of corruption, the part we pretend is too complex to understand. Corporations talk about values while bribing reality into submission. Financial systems lecture the poor about responsibility while laundering fortunes with immaculate paperwork. Media outlets expose corruption selectively, depending on who owns the printing press or the server farm. In 2025, everyone knew. That was the difference. Ignorance was no longer plausible.
What made this year especially obscene was the collapse of shame. Corruption used to require some embarrassment, some effort to hide. Now it performs. It tweets. It dares investigators to keep up. It files lawsuits against its critics. It frames itself as a victim of “witch hunts” and “political persecution.” And disturbingly often, it wins not because it’s innocent, but because it’s exhausting to fight something that never sleeps and never apologizes.
The public is not blameless. Outrage has become performative too. We share, we rage, we scroll. We demand resignations knowing full well they won’t come. We consume scandals like episodes then complain the plot never changes. Corruption thrives not only on power, but on fatigue. In 2025, fatigue was everywhere.
So if this year must be named, don’t reduce it to a man or a single war. Call it the year the mask slipped. The year corruption stopped pretending to be an exception and revealed itself as a system. A system that adapts faster than laws, speaks louder than ethics, and survives every election cycle with a smirk.
This is not a call for despair. It’s a call for accuracy. You cannot fight what you refuse to name. And 2025 made the name unavoidable. Corruption didn’t just mark the year. It dared us to notice and to decide whether noticing is where our courage ends.
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