In addition to the protests that turned violent last week in France, were demonstrations in Italy and Albania, in Spain and Portugal, in Belgium and Greece. The protesters were all ages but mostly they were young. Young people who were not merely angry, they were, they are, furious.
Protesters are followers who feel screwed by their leaders – leaders they think screwed up.
Europe’s problems – and to a lesser extent America’s – are as profound as pervasive. They are political and fiscal, moral and spiritual. They are at the individual level, such as low wages and high rents, and they are at the national level, such as poor public services and ballooning national debt. And they are existential – especially the impact on young lives of climate change and artificial intelligence.
Because old leaders are enraging young followers, large numbers of the latter are refusing to follow the former. Rather than complying they are resisting.
Groups and organizations cannot, however, function when mayhem is sustained. Too much mayhem and the collective cracks up. Which leaves the authorities in France, for example, with no choice but to crack down.
To be clear, crackdowns like these are not just for the benefit of the group – in this case the state. They are also for the benefit of the individual. A modicum of law and order is as required for you and me to survive as it is for the group of which we are a part. It’s why “submission is the human condition.”*
Consider the example of El Salvador’s incumbent president (since 2019), Nayib Bukele. He transformed what was once one of the world’s deadliest countries into what now is one of the world’s safest. How did he do it? With an iron fist. By declaring a state of emergency that gave his government virtually unlimited power. This included free rein to round up tens of thousands of mostly young men who, in rapidly held mass trials, were sentenced to long, hard years in prison.
Have Bukele’s hardball tactics backfired? Is he reviled for the extreme severity, even cruelty, with which he runs his government? Not hardly. At home, because his people are so relieved to be living in a largely safe, stable country as opposed to one that was dangerously unsafe and unstable, his approval ratings are sky high. And abroad, across large swaths of Latin America including in, for example, Columbia and Ecuador, Bukele is widely admired. Seen as a strongman who is not to be repudiated but emulated.
Is there any connection between leadership and followership in Europe and leadership and followership in Latin America? I’ll answer the question in Part II of this post.
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*For more on “submission is the human condition,” see Chapter 2 of my book, Why We Follow Leaders – and Why We Don’t.