我們的領導人怎么了？

我們的領導人怎么了？

近日，西蒙娜·薇依和赫爾穆特·科爾的相繼去世令人不禁扼腕，這不免讓我們想到，在如今這個空虛而愚蠢的年代里，我們似乎很難再找到令人敬佩的偉大領導人了。為什么會這樣？我們的領導人究竟怎么了？

測試中可能遇到的詞匯和知識：

reconciliation調(diào)和（和解，一致）[?rek?ns?li'e??n]

sanitise消毒，使無害[?rek?ns?li'e??n]

grotesque奇怪的，可笑的[ɡr??'tesk]

lacerating被撕裂的，受傷的['læs?re?t]

imbue灌輸，使感染，使充滿['læs?re?t]

patronage贊助，任免權['pætr?n?d?/

apartheid種族隔離[?'pɑ?ta?t]

arithmetic算術[?'r?θm?t?k]

vacuousness空虛，愚蠢[?'r?θm?t?k]

What has happened to the quality of our leaders?（710 words）

By Michael Skapinker

Simone Veil, former French health minister, women's champion, social reformer and president of the European Parliament, passed away last week. Her death came shortly before the funeral of Helmut Kohl, the German chancellor who presided over the unification of his country.

Ms Veil survived Auschwitz. Mr Kohl could be insensitive to the Nazis' victims, pressing US president Ronald Reagan to visit a cemetery where SS members were buried. But he strove to ensure Germany's peaceful future in Europe and its reconciliation with old enemies. He helped reshape a continent.

Kohl succeeded two chancellors whose seriousness and stature remain vivid in the memories of those of us in the generation after theirs: Willy Brandt, who died in 1992, and Helmut Schmidt who passed away in 2015. All these leaders had their flaws, human and political. But they were a towering generation. Where do we find their like today?

History will probably view Angela Merkel, the present German chancellor, as a figure of substance. But the rest? The UK faces, in Brexit, its greatest challenge since the end of empire and the Suez crisis.

And who does the country of Winston Churchill have at its head? Theresa May, whose veneer of competence cracked on its first encounter with the electorate. Itching to take over from her is Labour's Jeremy Corbyn, whose approach to Brexit is as incoherent as hers.

France's new president, Emmanuel Macron, promises much, but is yet to be tested. He won the election after his Socialist predecessor François Hollande, in whose government he served, became a figure of ridicule. Mr Macron defeated Marine Le Pen, who won over a third of the votes cast. In spite of her attempts to sanitise it, her National Front has its roots in the political culture that persecuted Ms Veil.

In the US, President Donald Trump's increasingly grotesque behaviour last weekend included tweeting a doctored video of him wrestling a CNN journalist to the ground.

What has happened to the quality of our leaders? One answer is that, unlike the generation of Veil and Kohl, leaders today have had no lacerating experience, such as the second world war, to imbue them with an understanding of the consequences of institutional breakdown and ethnic and racial hatred.

But if lack of experience of hard times has produced today's inadequates, how do we explain South Africa? Nelson Mandela and Jacob Zuma both suffered under apartheid and spent years in prison for opposing it. Yet the former was a case study in integrity and leadership while the latter presides over a patronage-strewn embarrassment of a government.

Is the problem that today's leaders are exercising their skills outside politics, perhaps in business? Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, and his wife started the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is active in health, education and the empowerment of women and girls. Michael Bloomberg, founder of the eponymous financial information and news company, has served as mayor of New York. Paul Polman, chief executive of Unilever, has championed business as a force for social and environmental good.

But there are not enough business chiefs to compensate for the dearth of political leaders and, in any case, they do not run our countries.

Do we have such poor leaders because we deserve them? This is a common view, which says that we live in trivial, reality television-addled times and, as a result, elect unserious or incompetent leaders to represent us.

But there are plenty of signs that electorates are unhappy with the political choices on offer. In last month's UK general election, voters refused to entrust either the Conservatives or Labour with the task of ruling them, resulting in a hung parliament.

Although the arithmetic of the electoral college propelled him to the White House, Mr Trump won fewer votes than Hillary Clinton in last year's presidential poll. And in local elections last year, Mr Zuma's African National Congress saw its votes fall as it lost key cities such as Johannesburg and Pretoria to the opposition.

Possibly the problem is our archaic parties and that we need new political movements to enthuse able would-be leaders to enter politics. Mr Macron's République en Marche is one such movement. In an age of political vacuousness, there is a lot riding on his success.