Week 19: A comparison between five leading populists

(Topic suggested by Graham Thornicroft).

 

A comparison between five leading populists

Jair Bolsonaro, Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Viktor Orban and Narendra Modi

 

23 July	Total Cases	Cases/M	Daily cases	Total deaths	Deaths/M	Daily deaths
Bolsonaro	2.2M	9,917	41,000	80,100	383	1,367
Trump	3.9M	11,570	72,000	140,900	429	1,160
Johnson	0.29M	4,351	450	45,300	669	110
Orban	0.004M	449	190	500	61	0
Mody	1.16M	837	8,900	28,900	20	64.5

 

Jair Bolsonaro has slipped behind the USA in cases/M and daily cases, but has the most daily deaths of the 5 leaders. He has been a captain in the Brazilian Army, and admirer of the military government that ruled between 1964 and 1985. He adopted a stance of anti-establishment indignation after he left the Army in 1988. He had the great advantage of being able to observe at close quarters the petrobras scandal, the most serious ever to involve Brazilian life, in which 33 Senators, 37 federal deputies and 23 other public figures were involved in improperly receiving public monies. Several went to prison, but many managed to avoid it.. He is known to be a misogynist, and a homophobic racist – who has gone on record as saying that if his own son was involved in homosexuality he would be incapable of loving him. He is supported by a group of Christian Evangelists because of his objections to abortion, and now has over 5M Facebook followers. He is proud of being “the Trump of the tropics”. He has done nothing whatever to control the pandemic, but has used the opportunity of his presidency to obtain economic advantages by allowing the devastation of over 3,000 square metres of rain forest, and the exploitation of the area by farmers. All these measures are presented as being in Brazil’s best interests, despite the real damage to its native population. 

 

Donald Trump ignominiously loses the race both for Cases/M and Daily new cases, but is just ahead of Brazil for daily new deaths. He was elected as President of the United States in 2016. He initially selected an inexperienced Cabinet which has progressively worsened, as he has replaced many members whom he fired or who resigned with those ever less qualified and more beholden to him. As a result, he has no one to advise him whom he cannot ignore. Compounding this is his conviction that he is a scientific genius intuiting the truth immediately, hence his insistence to this day on promoting an antimalarial drug that in an initial uncontrolled trial seemed to show some promise, but in later more rigorous testing proved harmful. Initially when the coronavirus began to manifest, he had the acknowledged expert, Dr Anthony Fauci, by his side in his frequent television appearances - ostensibly to inform the public about the virus. However it became apparent that these press conferences were more like promotional exercises for himself, and as Dr Fauci’s message was at odds with the President’s, they were discontinued abruptly and Fauci effectively silenced. Trump now spoke alone on the virus. Amidst a morass of misinformation he said that the virus was ‘harmless to 99% of its victims’, ‘it is not serious’, ‘it is under control‘. The ‘US is testing more that’s why there are more cases’, ‘the US is doing better than most other countries and is ready to open its economy’. In addition Trump has modeled not wearing a face mask, not taking the pandemic seriously and encouraged those who have opposed restrictions.  Now after two months of no briefings, responding to alarm by Republicans over his falling approval ratings he has decided to resume because ‘we had lots of people watching, record numbers, there’s never been anything like it’.  What do the American public get from Mr Trump? The old back numbers who used to work in power stations burning fossil fuels have been told that the dirtiest ones will stay open; the business men who work in oil and natural gas are now allowed to drill in places previously forbidden to them. Mr Trump even has a way of referring to all the people he approves of - they are just ‘Americans’.  He argues that the major advantage of supporting him will be the massive economic advantages of electing him in November.

 

Boris Johnson has the most deaths/M of the 5 populists, an embarrassing position because of the much smaller population than either USA or Brazil. He has been a prominent politician in favour of leaving the European Union, and his eventual success in becoming Prime Minister in 2019, after a period in which he served first as Mayor of London, and then as Foreign Secretary.  It is impossible to separate him from the views of his senior advisor, Dominic Cummings – who is an energetic supporter of Mr Johnson’s views on the EU, but also encourages him in his critique of the civil service and the BBC. He and Mr Cummings delayed introducing lockdown for about a week after other European countries had done so, thus allowing a definite increase in the death rate introduced by the pandemic. When this is combined with our much smaller population, it produces the high deaths per million. It is important to record that in the week before he agreed to the lockdown, Mr Johnson had visited a hospital treating victims of the pandemic and shaken hands with those that he met, and that he had also attended a football match where no attempt was made to observe social distancing. Both he and Mr. Cummings fell victim to the virus – during which Mr Cummings drove over 270 miles to visit his parents in Co. Durham, and later drove his wife and son to a beauty spot on her birthday. Despite the widely-held view that Mr Cummings should either apologise for his behavior or resign, Mr Johnson resolutely defended his behavior, but experienced a substantial fall in his own popularity.  Without Mr Cummings’ advice, Mr Johnson does not know what to think, and cannot possibly continue without him. His behaviour in the House is one of an apparent inability to deal with simple factual questions, preferring to use bluster and to relapse on to cheap party political points. Having said this, he is the only one of the 5 leaders to have given at least an awareness that a leader needs to give a clear response to the virus. It seems all too likely that the prize for the loyal English conservatives who made him PM will be only Brexit, with a heavy price to pay in import taxes. Still worse, Scotland and N.Ireland would have preferred to stay in the EU. 

 

Mr Victor Orban has no daily deaths now, and from this point of view has won any competition between the five men. He became President of Hungary in 2010, well before the others. By 2013 he had annulled the rulings of the Constitutional Court for rulings which preceded 2011, and directed that Judges and prosecutors must retire at the usual retirement age. Many judges started resigning from their jobs, as the changes have threatened the autonomy of around 3000 judges. The new court system introduced by him will handle all cases involving human rights, but they will be without judicial oversight. Allowing the ‘Minister of Justice’ to control the court system makes a mockery of the separation of powers and the rule of law. In December 2018 Hungary passed a law to control the judiciary, and by March 11, 2000 Mr Orban  was given power to rule for the forseeable future. The ‘Enabling Act’, passed on March 20, 2020, grants Mr Oban unprecedented emergency powers, so that the Executive can rule by decree for an indefinite period of time. The new law allows the government to prolong these extensions indefinitely, and can be regarded as the last nail in the coffin of the pre-1989 democratic system. On 12 March Mr Orban shocked his hosts in Moldova by openly shaking hands with them. When other European countries accepted the lockdown including schools, Mr Orban threatened teachers with unpaid leave for the rest of the year, and warned parents that pupils would miss the whole year.  By next day Mr Orban announced the closure of schools from 16 March. Key decisions were allocated to 11 “operative groups”, and the military was allowed to take control of more than 100 ‘strategic companies’. In the final stage the transformation of the emergency decrees into the new legal norm made the government unaccountable and potentially unchallengeable. Having managed to exclude Muslims, what is he offering faithful Hungarians, other than racial purity? This reminds us of a previous European leader, now dead.

 

Mr Narendra Modi, despite his huge population, still seems to have manageable numbers of deaths/M and new daily deaths. He was elected 14^th Prime Minister of India in 2014. He has led the BJ party, which protects Hindu rights.  He is a single man, and a vegetarian. He has left his home and neglects his family, but is widely considered a workaholic and spiritual man. As a communicator he is adept at using social media, and is the second most followed leader in the world, with 5 million twitter followers.  On the downside his police merely watched as Hindu mobs in Gujarat’s main city and surrounding towns desecrating mosques, burning entire Muslim communities and leaving 100,000 people homeless. He has been compared – by his many enemies – with Adolf Hitler, Slobodan Milosevic and Pol Pot. His brand of chauvinist anti-Muslim politics is likely to be popular with the Hindu majority, and he is expected to do well in national elections. No-one has been brought to justice for the murder of Muslims – India’s high court threw out a case against 21 people accused of burning 14 Muslims to death after it emerged that all the potential prosecution witnesses  had been terrorized into silence. All right wing populist leaders need an out-group, and India’s 140M Muslims are clearly his. The covid-19 virus entered India on 30 January 2020, carried by a student from Wuhan. As the number of cases reached 500, Mr Modi declared a trial lockdown, soon extended.  On 22 March he ordered a lockdown of the entire population on 1.3 billion people for 3 weeks, later later to the end of June for certain areas. The main problem in the Indian pandemic was that the huge numbers of migrant workers were left to make their own way to villages that were often many 100s of kilometres away. Many died of starvation before they reached their destinations. He is offering the Hindus he represents racial purity again.

 

Conclusion   What have we learned? The five men seem to be unpleasant in fairly distinctive ways. Bolsonaro with his devastation of a precious natural resource, Trump with economic benefits for “Americans” that may not help them very much, Orban and Modi for the racial purity of those in those sections of the population that they favour. This is perhaps the most peculiar outcome of this report: despite his manifest shortcomings, Boris Johnson is easily the least loathsome of the five men. But what kind of Brexit will Mr Johnson achieve, inspired by Mr Cummings? A huge car crash, I am afraid. Can Keir Starmer save us? I very much doubt it.

 

David Goldberg

23^rd July 2020, and vaccination still only a distant prospect.