IN DEFENCE OF CONSERVATIVES

There are many on the left who blithely point out that political leadership in the face of the pandemic has been shown by those with more left wing views. They point out that right wing leaders like Trump, Bolsonaro and Johnson have failed to protect their people against the virus. They say that these men’s backgrounds do nothing to prepare them for the leadership required to fight covid 19. Defenders of these politicians do them no favours by describing these backgrounds as if they gave them an advantage: Trump with his fortune, Bolsonaro with the military and Johnson with his leadership of Britain’s departure from the EU. Critics quickly point to Trump as nothing more than a TV celebrity whose inherited wealth has given him the power to build skyscrapers and golf courses. They describe Bolsonaro’s extreme misogynistic and racist views and Johnson as little more than a TV comic with multiple failures as London’s mayor, the UK’s foreign secretary and the severe economic impact that Brexit brings.

On the other side, the left point to the many female leaders who have impressively led against the invasion of the virus. Mette Frederiksen in Denmark, Katrín Jakobsdóttir in Iceland, Sanna Marin in Finland and Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand all have decidedly left wing backgrounds: as does the male Moon Jae-in in South Korea who was arrested as a student activist and became a human rights lawyer. Multiple examples of their leadership qualities are described like Jacinda Ardern’s leading her cabinet to join her with a 20% pay cut. In an apparent comment concerning the UK’s and USA’s talking about “herd immunity” as a way to fight the virus, Ardern said ‘Some countries talked about herd immunity as a strategy. In New Zealand we never ever considered that. Herd immunity would have meant 10s of 10000s of New Zealanders dying & I simply would not have tolerated that.’

However, there is a defence that those on the right should adopt. The example is the Conservative leader of Germany. It is true that Merkel showed some decidedly left-wing attitudes when she welcomed in thousands of refugee migrants; but she leads the conservative Christian Democratic party and would certainly not describe herself as left wing. Instead, her supporters point to the way that she has responded quickly to the threat of the virus by seeming to understand the science much better than Trump, Bolsonaro and Johnson. Her conservatism does not appear to have dulled the intelligence that gained her a doctorate in quantum chemistry and her work as a research scientist in the 1980s. Not many left wing leaders have those qualifications: so it is possible to be an effective conservative leader provided that you can demonstrate the qualifications gained by Angela Merkel.