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Gerald Ford
Born
The test case for separating popularity from accountability. Ford took over after Nixon resigned over Watergate, declared that 'our long national nightmare is over' and ran a noticeably more open White House. His pardon of Nixon a month later ended any prospect of holding the former president to account in court and cost him dearly in the polls. The institutional repairs of the period, from the Federal Election Campaign Act amendments of 1974 to the Church Committee, came largely from Congress rather than from him.
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Jimmy Carter
Born
Carter won the 1976 election promising 'I will never lie to you', and his administration turned post-Watergate distrust into law. He signed the Ethics in Government Act of 1978, which created financial disclosure for senior officials and the Office of Government Ethics, the Inspector General Act placing independent auditors inside federal departments, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requiring court warrants for intelligence wiretaps. Inspectors general remain a central accountability tool, though their independence has been tested by later presidents.
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Raúl Alfonsín
Born
Argentina's first president after the 1976 to 1983 dictatorship set up the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, whose report Nunca Más documented nearly 9,000 disappearances, and put the junta leaders on trial in 1985, the first such trial of a military regime by a civilian court in Latin America. Under pressure from military uprisings he then passed the Full Stop and Due Obedience laws limiting further prosecutions. Those laws were annulled in 2003, and hundreds of officers have since been convicted.
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Patricio Aylwin
Born
Aylwin governed with Pinochet still commanding the army, so he aimed for 'justice in so far as possible'. His Rettig Commission identified more than 2,000 people killed or disappeared by the dictatorship, he apologised on behalf of the state in a televised address, and his government created reparations for victims' families. Prosecutions were blocked for years by the 1978 amnesty law, and torture survivors had to wait for the Valech Commission in 2004. His approach rebuilt civilian authority slowly rather than all at once.
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Itamar Franco
Born
Franco became Brazil's president when Fernando Collor resigned in December 1992 as the Senate tried him for corruption, the first time Brazil had removed a president through constitutional impeachment. Franco's reputation for personal honesty steadied the government, he formed a broad cabinet and he appointed Fernando Henrique Cardoso as finance minister, who launched the Real Plan that ended hyperinflation. The institutional point was that the 1988 constitution had removed a president without the army stepping in.
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Carlo Azeglio Ciampi
Born
In 1993 the Tangentopoli bribery investigations had implicated much of Italy's governing class, and Ciampi, the Bank of Italy governor, became the first prime minister who was not a member of parliament. His year in office brought the July 1993 agreement with unions and employers that ended wage indexation, budget discipline and a new mixed electoral law. He later served as a widely respected president from 1999 to 2006. The old parties collapsed anyway, and the system that replaced them produced its own scandals.
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Morihiro Hosokawa
Born
Successive bribery scandals, Recruit and Sagawa Kyubin among them, ended 38 years of Liberal Democratic rule in 1993, and Hosokawa led the eight-party coalition that replaced it. His 1994 political reform laws replaced multi-member constituencies with a mix of single seats and proportional lists, introduced public funding for parties and tightened rules on corporate donations. They remain the basis of Japanese elections. He resigned within a year over a loan scandal of his own, which shows how hard the repair was.
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Kim Young-sam
Born
South Korea's first civilian president in three decades took office in 1993 amid deep suspicion of the military-era elite. He introduced the real-name financial system that ended anonymous bank accounts used for slush funds, required senior officials to disclose their assets, purged the army's secret Hanahoe faction and allowed prosecution of two former presidents. These were concrete repairs to accountability. His own son was later jailed for corruption, and the 1997 financial crisis ended his term in disgrace.
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John Major
Born
The 'cash for questions' affair of 1994, in which two Conservative MPs were accused of taking money to ask parliamentary questions, led Major to set up the Committee on Standards in Public Life under Lord Nolan. Its seven principles of public life, selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership, and its recommendation of an independent Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards still govern British public office. It did not save his government from the 'sleaze' label that helped sink it in 1997.
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Valentín Paniagua
Born
When Alberto Fujimori fled to Japan in November 2000 after videos showed his spy chief bribing congressmen, Paniagua, the newly elected president of Congress, became interim president of Peru. In eight months he organised what observers judged a clean election, began the anti-corruption prosecutions that eventually jailed Fujimori and his spy chief Vladimiro Montesinos, and created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on the conflict with the Shining Path. He handed over on schedule in July 2001 and never sought the office himself.
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Angela Merkel
Born
In December 1999, as the CDU's general secretary, Merkel wrote a newspaper article telling her party to break with Helmut Kohl after he admitted taking secret donations and refused to name the donors. It was a striking act against her own mentor, and it worked: she became party leader in 2000 and chancellor in 2005. The party paid fines and repaid funds under the party financing law, and its recovery came from a clear break with the leader who had created the scandal.
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Gordon Brown
Born
The 2009 MPs' expenses scandal, revealed by the Daily Telegraph, damaged every party, led to the first resignation of a Commons Speaker in three centuries and sent several MPs and peers to prison. Brown's government passed the Parliamentary Standards Act within weeks, ending MPs' self-regulation of pay and expenses and creating the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, which still publishes every claim. Brown himself gained little: his party lost the 2010 election, and public trust in MPs has not recovered to pre-scandal levels.
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Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir
Born
Iceland's three main banks failed in October 2008, protests drove the government out, and Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, the world's first openly gay head of government, took over in 2009. Her coalition backed a special prosecutor whose work led to prison sentences for senior bankers, a parliamentary investigation that named failings by ministers and regulators, and the impeachment trial of the former prime minister. A citizen-drafted constitution was approved in a 2012 referendum but never enacted by parliament.
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