Virus crisis tests the mettle of world’s leaders – but some may emerge stronger after the storm
‘In these days I have been thinking about the old speeches of Churchill – it is our darkest hour but we will make it’
The global coronavirus pandemic has set the world’s political leaders a common test of their abilities to both rally public spirits and quiet the national pulse in a time of crisis.
Not since the Spanish flu of 1918 has there been a global emergency which has so even-handedly challenged national leaders; with the age of information making all the world a stage for the different cultural and political responses.
For some leaders, the crisis has proven an unexpected opportunity to cement previously precarious political positions – while for others there are already warning signs that coronavirus may yet prove their political undoing.
Despite being a global phenomenon, coronavirus has also revealed sharp national differences in style and approach; a reminder that, first and foremost, the world remains a collection of nation states.
This was never clearer than in Europe when the two most powerful leaders – Emmanuel Macron of France and Angela Merkel of Germany – struck very different tones as they addressed their respective nations.
The French may have bemoaned Mr Macron’s “Jupiterian” tendencies but in the face of the epidemic, his Napoleonic streak and Gaullist personalisation of power have struck a chord.
In martial tones, he announced national confinement last week, repeating several times that the country was at “war”, although that didn’t stop him ordering compatriots to take time to “read more” while cooped up, as culture is food for the soul. It was all very French.
Over in Berlin, Mrs Merkel didn’t try to be Churchill, Napoleon or anybody else when she made her first emergency televised national address in more than 14 years as German chancellor. She was just Merkel – and that was exactly what Germany wanted.
There was no grand rhetoric, but the woman who has steered Germany through the financial, eurozone and migration crises, just explained in calm and measured tones to Germans why they are being asked to stay at home, to protect the most vulnerable.
“These are not simply abstract numbers or statistics,” she said. “And we are a community in which every life and every person matters.” To the pride of many Germans, she signed off her address not with a German equivalent to “Vive la République” or “God bless America”, but with a simple
“Take good care of yourself ”.
Elsewhere in Europe, the crisis has provided an unexpected new platform for leaders such as Giuseppe Conte of Italy, who until recently was seen largely as a stooge, mediating between fractious coalition partners – first the hard-right League and the populist Five Star Movement and then, when that alliance collapsed in the summer, Five Star and the centre-left Democrats. But as the crisis progressed the little-known law professor has been seen to play a steady hand, with polls showing his approval ratings at a record high of 71 per cent, marginalising Matteo Salvini, his Right-wing nemesis.
Mr Conte may not be Churchillian in speech or demeanour, but has drawn on his example. “In these days, I have been thinking about the old speeches of Churchill – it is our darkest hour, but we will make it,” he said when announcing further lockdowns. Meanwhile, Pedro
Sánchez, of Spain has thrived in a press room devoid of physical journalists and the opposition cowed into relative loyalty.
His straight-to-camera promises “not to leave anyone behind” have evoked memories of Spain’s turbulent transition era.
Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister, visited supermarkets to joke that the country had so much lavatory paper stockpiled the country could “poop for 10 years” and not run out.
Over in Ireland Leo Varadkar, a Taoiseach on borrowed time after a weak performance in a recent election, blended the rhetorical style of John F Kennedy with paternalistic invocations to children to help their parents and phone their grandparents. “In years to come, let them say of us, when things were at their worst, we were at our best,” he said in a televised St Patrick’s Day address where the country’s legendary pubs were shut down. There have also been rougher
edges, where some leaders have used the crisis to vent against old enemies – notably Aleksandr Vučić, Serbia’s president, who delivered an address dripping with contempt for the European Union, which blocked the export of medical supplies.
“International solidarity does not exist. European solidarity does not exist. It was a fairy tale on paper,” he said, raising fears that coronavirus will further weaken the EU’S influence over the Balkan hinterland, to the advantage of Beijing or Moscow – where Vladimir Putin has made no address to the nation at all.
In China and Asia, where the crisis began, leaders have tapped into more authoritarian and Confucian political cultures as they addressed the Covid-19 crisis.
Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader who returned “strongman” leadership to China, was accused of being slow to act, with public discontent rising sharply in February after a whistleblowing doctor succumbed to coronavirus – but a sharp fall in cases has rescued his crisis.
In Japan, Shinzō Abe originally took flak for shutting Japanese schools but he has since reaped dividends for a decision that now looks far-sighted.
Elsewhere, in South Korea and Taiwan – two countries that are also widely seen to have handled the epidemic well – both leaders appear to have grown through the crisis. Moon Jae-in, the South Korean president, initially looked overwhelmed, but as the nation’s military and health infrastructure went into overdrive, he was quickly able to project a more warrior-like image of slaying the virus.
Taiwan’s success in keeping numbers so low has also proved a boon for the country’s “cat lady” president Tsai Ing-wen, whose campaign posters often feature her cradling her favourite feline. She has projected an air of intense, scientific calm. Asia’s highly-controlled response contrasted with that in Iran – the worst-hit country in the Middle East – Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, has found balancing a bloodsweat-and-tears rallying cry and stoical reassurance a tricky act.
While in one breath he has told the public to “act on the instructions given by experts”, in the next he described the Covid-19 threat as “temporary” and “not grave” while telling the public they could beat the crisis “by praying, by supplicating, by relying on the immaculate Imams”.
Across the Atlantic, where the forces of populist democracy in North and South America make for inevitably messier outcomes, the responses have been notably more volatile.
Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Mexico’s populist president, took a leaf out of Donald Trump’s early playbook, dismissing doom-laden predictions and telling his countrymen no one “should stop hugging because of coronavirus” because “nothing’s going to happen”. Jair Bolsonaro, the Brazilian leader, also took the early Trumpian line, describing it as “a fantasy”. But if Mr Trump had started shakily, dismissing Covid-19 as a “Democrat hoax” and giving an initial address to the nation full of factual errors, then in recent days he has stepped up to the presidential plate.
Despite giving into what (to foreign ears) often look like his worst instincts – bullying White House reporters and repeatedly referring to coronavirus as the “Chinese flu” – the style has played well with large sections of the American public. Declaring himself a “wartime president,” he vowed to “defeat the invisible enemy”, and settle for nothing less than “total victory” – the stock market be damned. Reporting from Roland Oliphant, Ben Riley-smith, Sophia Yan, Josie Ensor, Justin Huggler, Henry Samuel, Nick Squires, Nicola Smith, James Crisp, James Badcock, Julian Ryall, Nataliya Vasilyeva and James Rothwell