During national crises, leaders see their popularity rise. But bleak prospects in the long-term could change the public's mood
FEW WOULD envy their political leaders at times like this. The battle with covid-19 is one with an implacable enemy in which the politicians seem always to be losing, and struggling to catch up with the pace of events. The coronavirus will not submit to their armoury of promises, threats or flattery; funding pledges or sanctions. Unlike the economy, in which actions and consequences are separated by months or years, the coronavirus exposes the errors of leaders with merciless speed.
The most obvious is that, like everybody else, they are susceptible to infection. Mr Johnson is far from the only leading politician to have contracted covid-19. In Iran several politicians and officials have died, and the infected include Ali Akbar Velayati, an adviser to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader. Senior politicians in France, Italy and Spain have tested positive. Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, had to isolate himself after his wife tested positive.
At times like these, moreover, theirs are dangerous jobs. Normally, politics is a contact sport, a matter of meeting people, of making speeches to crowded rooms or cheering rallies; of combative debates in closed parliamentary chambers; of glad-handing crowds and kissing babies; of taking vital decisions while cloistered with cabinet colleagues, advisers and senior officials. All of this is much harder in a time of semi-quarantine.
But besides having to be seen to lead model lives, politicians in office face a far more fundamental difficulty: how to explain the gravity of the moment without inculcating disillusionment in their leadership and, ultimately, public despair? The remedies, in terms of the economic collapse caused by shutting away much of the population, can seem almost as dire as the virus itself.
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