Any student of history can tell you that Europe once produced statesmen whose achievements echoed through history. It moulded people of stature and moral gravity and turned them into leaders. But now it seems the governing chambers of the continent are awash with the mediocrity of middle management, and jammed full with politicians full of posture and panic.
The giants have gone, and in their place, we have technocrats with the charisma of a spreadsheet. They speak endlessly of “values” but are entirely unsure of what those values are. From Brussels to Berlin, they govern proud nations by committee and appear more and more detached from their own voters.
So here, in the spirit of honesty and public service, are Europe’s seven most lamentable leaders, the ones who might make you a little nostalgic for a time when leadership meant something.
7 Leo Varadkar
Leo Varadkar somehow always looks immaculate. He has the appearance of a corporate away day host, fluent in the language of the lanyard, “stakeholders”, “resilience”. Ireland, a proud and self-confident nation, now seems to be set adrift as the European Union’s model pupil: eager to please and terrified of teachers. Under the steady hand of Mr Varadkar, national interest has increasingly come second to his need to summon the applause of European leaders.
He governs Ireland as though his country were merely a star on the European flag in need of some spit and polish. Charismatic in a way that leaves no aftertaste, he offers tone without substance. Varadkar’s Ireland may boast impressive economic figures from time to time, but increasingly it appears oddly rootless, the soporific speeches of its leadership reducing it to a nation managed, not led. Regrettably, he is the poster child of the new wave of the EU’s leadership class: young, polished, and utterly forgettable.
(Image: Getty)
6 Mark Rutte
Rutte has sat ensconced in the halls of power in the Netherlands for so long that his face may well be carved into the walls of the Hague as some sort of snarling golem. He’s something of a master at political survival, turning each stage into his career, somehow, into another attempt at the summit of a political mountain. Rutte governed as though the purpose of politics was to keep things quiet. He was the mild-mannered undertaker of national debate, but under his watch, life got worse and worse for swathes of the Dutch.
Normally a mild-mannered person, his policies enraged the Dutch and led to farmers’ protests, which Rutte crassly branded as “rude, inappropriate, and unacceptable” before promptly darting into the chairmanship of NATO. Each step on his career path kept him fairly close to the centre, and he met dissent with a shrug. In many ways, he was the perfect metaphor for a continent that fears change more than failure.
(Image: AP)
5 Donald Tusk
Some politicians are defined by where they came from. Rooted in their nation, even as they ascend the heady heights of European Politics, they can never quite shake off the affectations that make them who they are. Donald Tusk is an exception to that rule. After years as President of the European Council, he returned to Poland, elected, yet somehow still the guardian of the orthodoxy of the undemocratic EU.
His every public intervention seems to drop with condescension towards Polish voters who dare to think for themselves. He bleats endlessly about Poland’s place in the European project, and even more, it seems that sovereignty is a nuisance to him, nationalism and embarrassment, and patriotism best left to someone else. Tusk is the living personification of the European Union’s belief that a nation exists to serve institutions, and not the other way around.
Mr Tusk has taken a country that was fast becoming a thorn in the side of the EU and turned it into one that is increasingly doing its best to be Brussels’ best friend.
(Image: AP)
4 Keir Starmer
Now I’ve written before about Starmer. He’s not quite so bad as to top a list, but his mediocrity, even in regard to his ability to disappoint, earns him a place fairly middling in this list. His greatest talent persists: incompetence masquerading as faux conviction. He is a man who seems perfectly at home drafting memos and is every bit the bureaucratic prime minister our country desperately didn’t need.
Watching his speeches is like listening to a cross-examination of national life, but somehow with even less theatre. His Government practically hums with consultations, audits, phases, and goodness knows what else. If you worked for him, and a meeting request came into your inbox, you could guarantee it would arrive just before you clocked off for the day.
Starmers Britain is neat, nervous and joyless. A country where initiative dies under another committee meeting. One can imagine him calling a consultation on whether or not he should have a personality. He admits to not having a favourite book, a favourite colour, or even dreaming. He’s not a villain, he’s just the embodiment of a managerial age, a clerk in No. 10 carefully filing our country away.
3 Emmanuel Macron
Macron once called himself “Jupiterian” in a remark which perplexed journalists and the public alike. But there’s a strange truth to it. He governs as though he were carved from marble, yet behaves like a man forever glancing at his own reflection. Macron’s issue is not arrogance; in some measure, it can be useful in a statesman.
His challenge lies in theatricality. Every policy is a performance, every summit a stage. It’s a presidency of mirrors and slogans, and whilst France’s rural heartland smoulders in anger, the elites of the cafes of Paris nod approvingly at his latest “vision”, even whilst they read the profiles of the latest Prime Minister to take up residence in the Hôtel Matignon. Macron is a man who mistakes eloquence for authority, and beneath the rhetoric lies an increasingly hollow core. Ambition without achievement will leave the next occupant of the Élysée Palace with no legacy to follow, and perhaps the familiar whiff of a political perfume: all scent, and no substance.
(Image: AFP via Getty Images)
2 Olaf Scholz
The now-former Chancellor, Mr Scholz, appeared unable to distinguish between steadiness and stupor. He radiated the energy of a damp filing cabinet, and saw Germany, once the dynamo of Europe, lulled into a managed decline. Industry across the country has stalled, confidence collapsed, and while in office, the best Scholz could do was offer another round of consultations.
He appeared far more concerned with arguments over climate targets than getting a grip as his country slid into economic inertia. The German public called him the Scholzomat, a man so robotic he made a Hoover seem spontaneous. He warrants such a high placing on this list for being perhaps the perfect leader for a continent that has forgotten how to lead. Germany in the modern age was desperate for a voice; in Scholz, all they got was a whimper.
(Image: Anadolu via Getty Images)
1 Ursula von der Leyen
There are bureaucrats, and then there is Ursula. Brussels’ Empress of everything, a politician who has spent decades at the top, but few can remember precisely for what. Her fiefdom is the world’s largest taking shop; an empire of directives and moralising. Bit by bit, she has set about dismantling the sovereignty of entire nations.
Her speeches are entirely joyless. And whilst crisis after crisis has beset Europe, they have been reframed as opportunities for the bookshelf of bureaucracy to be further expanded to cement her rule in a papier-mache of regulations growing more and more difficult to disentangle oneself from.
Europe needed a Bismarck; what it got was a brochure of red tape. When, eventually, she leaves office, the only thing she’ll have unified is Europe’s shared sense of exhaustion.
(Image: Getty Images)
There are poor leaders, and then there are those who defy description. Those mentioned above are lacklustre, but even their most vehement detractors would not say they were anything more than just a little useless.
Vladimir Putin rises above all other leaders on the continent, and will rightly be remembered in the dark chapters of history as the greatest tyrant of the modern age. A cold-eyed despot whose illegal invasion of Ukraine was an abomination that has brought Europe to the brink.
And yet it is symptomatic of a Europe that has allowed this encroachment to gather pace before it erupted into war. Whilst leaders in the West prattled on about partnership, Putin’s leviathan readied itself for war. Now, Putin’s Russia razes entire cities and murders on a whim. Children have been abducted, hospitals shelled, and towns erased. Putin’s Russia is evil in deliberate and practised motion.
He dresses his barbarism in the language of patriotism, and yet there is nothing Russian about slaughtering his continental kin. His allies claim he is advancing a pseudo-historical vision of Russia whilst turning his country into a temple of death. He has risen to the top on the currency of fear and is all too quick to spend it.
Britain knows this type. We have seen his kind before, the bully in a bunker and the tyrant who mistakes cruelty for courage. Evil always imagines itself as eternal, yet never is. One day, we can only hope that Putin will learn what every despot sees in the end: that free men and women are far stronger than cowards.
(Image: AP)
