A year into his job, the German chancellor is almost terminally unpopular. “Friedrich Merz can’t go on like this,” judges The Economist. But then neither can Sir Keir Starmer. No UK leader has collapsed from landslide-winner to national joke with such speed. He can reassure himself that his peer in the Élysée Palace inspires an even greater hatred. (Macron enculé, a phrase that I can’t find in my Collins French Conversation Second Edition, adorns many an exterior wall in Paris, that 16th-century Florence of graffiti.) As for Donald Trump, he was unpopular even before the Iran war.
What are the chances that all these heads of government are useless? Or “out of touch”? This could be an unusually bad cohort, but that was said of their immediate predecessors too, which is quite the coincidence. Think of the Scholzes, the Sunaks, the Bidens. We all know that Starmer’s successor will be a hate figure within months. If the next US president has an average approval rating of under 50 per cent, that will be the fifth one in a row. What bad luck voters are having.
I’ll be called a metropolitan snob — an absurd accusation, as I was telling the sommelier at Oma the other night — but isn’t it likelier that public expectations are the issue here? In rich and established democracies, what people want from life goes up until no conceivable government can provide it. Notice that one of the few major western countries to have a popular leader right now is Spain. It is a place with recent memories of dictatorship. India was very poor very recently. Sure enough, on some measures, Narendra Modi is the most popular leader in the free world.