The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Leaders in lockdown
The winners and losers on the world stage.
When Donald Trump suggested that injecting disinfectant could help to cure coronavirus, the tectonic global power plates appeared to undergo a seismic shift. The US President has never been famed for expressing opinions with subtlety, or indeed insight – but the socalled leader of the free world recommending the ingestion of bleach signalled a new low, even for his controversial administration.
Contrast that with a leader such as New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern – who won plaudits for swiftly placing the country under total lockdown, yet doing so compassionately, reassuring the nation’s children that the tooth fairy and Easter bunny would be classed as ‘essential workers’ – and Trump’s approach seems not just bombastic and misguided but downright dangerous.
If the true test of leadership is how well you function in a crisis, who are the current political winners and losers when it comes to Covid-19? While some are popular on the world stage, they remain Marmite figures at home, and few global leaders could be said to have had a ‘good’ time of it as they face the challenges of this virus.
With Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden posting tweets like, ‘I can’t believe I have to say this, but please don’t drink bleach,’ there is no doubt Trump’s mishandling of the outbreak could cost him the White House should November’s election still go ahead. Yet it isn’t just his bungled press briefings and latenight tweets that have seen him slide from world leader to world loser. According to Inderjeet Parmar, professor of international
politics at City, University of London, what has damaged the US’S global standing is Trump’s unwillingness to promote international cooperation, instead advocating an America First approach even in the face of a global pandemic. ‘Traditionally, the world has looked to the US to be the provider of goods for the world system – in terms of military might or humanitarian aid,’ says Prof Parmar. ‘But Trump appears intent on extracting as much as possible from everyone.’
And all while heaping the blame on China, whose international stock has also fallen dramatically amid growing claims of a cover-up, overseen by President Xi Jinping. Even those who have attempted to defend the communist state over its handling of the crisis, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), have been seen by some as complicit in a Beijing conspiracy. Meanwhile, China’s neighbour Taiwan – blocked from membership of the WHO by China – has recorded just a handful of deaths while keeping its economy afloat. Having Chen Chien-jen, an epidemiologist and an expert in viruses, as vice-president has helped the island state considerably.
Trump’s populist pattern of bizarre behaviour has been echoed by other ‘outsider’ leaders, such as Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi – both criticised for botching their response to Covid-19. The South American hard-right leader openly flouted social distancing and was still hugging and posing for photographs with fans in mid-april; while Modi has offered Indians an aid package amounting to just one per cent of GDP, compared to the 20 per cent stimulus packages of Britain, Germany and Spain.
Conversely, leaders who have come from what Prof Parmar describes as ‘the core components of party systems’ – Ardern, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron – appear to have fared better, at least from a global perspective. Although as Parmar points out, ‘While he may be regarded as an international statesman, Macron is less popular locally than Trump.’
The former banker was forced to issue a mea culpa to the Gallic nation on 13 April, when he admitted, ‘Mistakes were made. Were we sufficiently prepared? Obviously not – no one is prepared for a crisis of this magnitude.’
Coronavirus has also put him at odds with other EU leaders, most notably Merkel over Germany’s unwillingness to bail out hard-hit southern European nations such as Italy – once again picking at the scab that is the north-south divide at the heart of the Brussels bloc. ‘If you let part of Europe fall, the whole of Europe will fall,’ Macron warned.
Meanwhile, debate has raged across the continent over cautious approaches compared to the likes of Sweden, where the death rate per million is still lower than the UK’S, despite schools, bars and restaurants remaining open (although significantly higher than in neighbouring Norway, Finland and Denmark). Sweden’s Prime Minister Stefan Löfven hasn’t been given credit, but rather the country’s chief epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, who has gained almost cult-like celebrity status among supporters.
Politicians who have followed the science, such as Boris Johnson, have largely fared better than those, like Trump, who have pretended to know better than the boffins. And the Prime Minister’s personal experience of the virus, and being saved by the NHS, has given him a unique perspective on what he has described as the ‘invisible mugger’. However, Johnson’s televised address on Sunday, updating the lockdown restrictions, added to
confusion surrounding the UK
Government’s response, leaving the increasingly frustrated British public with more questions than answers.
Meanwhile Asian countries that have previous experience of infectious diseases such as Sars – along with eastern European nations that have in recent history faced greater adversity than their more complacent western neighbours – have proved themselves to be far better prepared. Before the first case of coronavirus, hardly anyone outside of Latvia had heard of its Prime Minister Krišjānis Kariņš. Now the Us-educated former businessman is being widely credited with the Baltic state’s containment of Covid-19 – as this issue went to press, Latvia had recorded just 18 deaths. As he told The Sunday Telegraph last month, ‘We took very many preliminary steps, before we were seeing people dying.’
Latvia declared a state of emergency over Covid-19 as early as 13 March – when Britain was still hosting major public events such as the Cheltenham Festival. Early, decisive action was also taken in Denmark, where no-nonsense Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen announced the closure of her country’s borders on the same day as Latvia. At 42, she is the youngest Danish premier in history, and has gained kudos not only for her straight-talking but for her sense of fun, posting a lockdown Facebook video of herself doing the dishes and singing along to ’80s Danish pop band Dodo and the Dodos.
As coronavirus threatens to loom large over the global political landscape until a vaccine is developed, only time will tell which leaders it forces into political extinction and which are inoculated against the economic fallout of the biggest global emergency in peacetime.
Trump has taken an America First approach, even in the face of a global pandemic