Is 92 too old to lead? Mahathir doesn’t think so
KUALA LUMPUR (AP) — The longtime strongman was born when silent films still packed movie theaters and Adolf Hitler was still a fringe politician. It was 1926, and his homeland was known as British Malaya.
Now Mahathir Mohamad is 92 years old. He is also Malaysia’s newest prime minister. It’s been 37 years since he first had the job, and 15 since he retired from it.
All of that raises an obvious question: how old is too old to run a country?
Mahathir, for one, insists he has time left. “I am, of course, quite old. No, I am very old,” he said in an April interview with The
Associated Press. “But I can still function.”
He’s right about that. Mahathir has had two coronary bypass surgeries, but still has a reasonably full head of hair.
He has a forceful presence, a love of political brawling, and a fondness for jokes.
He could easily pass for someone 20 years younger. He doesn’t hide his age.
“Young leaders do not have sufficient background,” he said in the interview. “And not many people with experience have survived. I have survived.”
Age has long been an issue for politicians. Ronald Reagan faced plenty of questions about his mental abilities when he ran for US president in 1980, and he was just 69 years old.
Robert Mugabe was ridiculed as Zimbabwe’s “dinosaur,” a man consumed by greed and power who refused to give way to a younger generation, until being pushed out at age 93.
During the Cold War the US warily watched a Soviet leadership dominated by men in their 70s and 80s, some of whom seemed to be barely clinging to life. But age isn’t always bad. “From the point of view of the outside world, there is something good to be said about a Kremlin gerontocracy,” The New York Times said in a 1976 editorial.