Pandemic shows flaws of premiers ranging from Donald Trump to Xi Jinping and Angela Merkel’s strengths
London — If a leader has a political weakness, the novel coronavirus is finding it.
The costs of being found wanting are potentially high. The death toll from the virus to date is more than 330,000, global supply chains have ruptured and millions of jobs have been destroyed. A Bloomberg Economics estimate, based on optimistic recovery scenarios, projects the pandemic will carve $6-trillion out of the global economy.
It isn’t clear whether voters will see the resulting chaos as failure on Trump’s part when they decide whether to re-elect him on November 3 China’s response revealed two core weaknesses of Xi and the one-party system he leads, according to Willy Lam, adjunct professor at the Center for China Studies in the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The first is a lack of transparency, from lowly officials reluctant to pass bad news upward for fear of damaging their careers, to Xi and other party leaders determined to announce only success.
Leadership is just one factor that may explain the huge variations in the impact Covid-19 has had in different countries. Among the most important: whether nations had recent experience with similar epidemics, a reason nations in Asia and Australasia have tended to be more sure-footed in their responses. Other factors include age demographics, population density, health system capacity and culture.
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