I am as guilty as the next pundit. An American so preoccupied with leadership in America – especially since the advent of Trump – that I am prone to ignore what’s happening in the rest of the world.
Big mistake, for several reasons. Among them is that what happens elsewhere, especially in the West, sometimes foreshadows a more general trend. So it’s worth noting the events of recent weeks in two small European countries. The first is the Czech Republic (population 10.7 million); the second is Austria (population 8.9 million). In both places was a political earthquake. In both places the nation’s top political leaders were dealt a body blow.
In the Czech Republic, Prime Minister Andrej Babis lost a parliamentary election. Though as I write the long-term implications of his loss are unclear, no question the surprising development badly weakened him, and no question it could spell the end of his hold on political power.
Babis lost shortly after the release of the Pandora Papers – that treasure trove of documents detailing corruption in high places worldwide – which revealed he had used shell companies to purchase a $22 million French chateau. But he might have lost anyway, since this electoral cycle his political opponents set aside their differences to challenge the populist prime minister who happened, by the way, also to be a billionaire. As one insider put it, a Czech political analyst, “The two opposition groups were formed because they wanted to be sure that liberal democracy would not be under the same attack as in Hungary and Poland.”
In Austria the boy wonder of European politics, Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, was toppled. He was forced to resign after a scandal indicating the heart of the Austrian government was riddled with corruption – and that he personally was guilty of using taxpayer money to fund his rise to power.
Just a few years before Kurz was king of the hill. When he was first elected chancellor, in 2017, he was the youngest head of government in the world, and the youngest chancellor in Austrian history. But his fall was as swift as certain, here too his opponents joined to dispose of him with dispatch. To be clear, Kurz remains the head of his political party, and he is still just 35 years old. But his fall has been as ignominious as precipitous, a vivid, almost visceral reminder that uneasy ought to be any head that wears any crown.