The Hated and the Dead

Warren Harding was the 29th President of the United States, serving between 1921 and his death from a heart attack in the Summer of 1923. Harding famously proclaimed a "return to normalcy" following a frenetic period defined by severe economic downturn, race riots, anarchist bombings and labour strikes in the aftermath of the First World War.  Though Harding’s presidency turned out to be...

Olaf Scholz has been Chancellor of Germany since December 2021. Following the collapse of his government a few weeks ago, he seems headed for electoral defeat early next year. Where did it all go wrong? As a character, Scholz is muted and impersonal almost to the point of being dreary - famously described as the “personification of boredom in politics” by Der Spiegel. Such qualities make a profile...

Patrice Lumumba was the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo for just ten weeks in 1960. The brevity of Lumumba's time in charge reflects he difficulties of governing an enormous, ethnically diverse country deliberately underdeveloped by its former Belgian colonial masters. But it was the fomenting rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union over Africa that had the la...

Daniel Noboa has been President of Ecuador since November 2023. The youngest democratically elected state leader in the world, Noboa has had a highly tumultuous introduction to high office. In January this year, violent crime in Ecuador, which had been increasing for nearly a decade, reached a terrible crescendo when two of the country’s gang leaders escaped from prison, and a series of armed atta...

Robert Fico has been the prime minister of Slovakia since 2023, and has served in that position three times since 2006.  The thankfully unsuccessful attempt on Fico's life came at a time when the prime minister had become genuinely controversial internationally for the first time. This followed an increasingly erratic approach to the Slovakian media, pronounced lockdown and vaccine skepcitism...

Nouri al-Maliki was Prime Minister of Iraq between 2006 and 2014, a tenure that makes him easily the country's longest serving post-2003 prime minister. Maliki became Iraq's head of government in the maelstrom of Iraq's sectarian civil war, following the 2003 US-UK invasion of the country. Today’s is a story of the collapse of the Iraqi state, and the highly imperfect efforts to reb...

Sadyr Japarov has been the President of Kyrgyzstan since 2021. Japarov's rise to power came after his country had experienced three revolutions in 15 years, in a part of the World unused to political upheaval. Today's episode investigates whether the three Kyrgyz revolutions, so unusual for Central Asia, have benefited the country's development. On the one hand, they sent a message...

Jean-Bertrand Aristide was President of Haiti three times between 1991 and 2004. A lightning rod for hope and democracy on his election in 1990, the overall course and tone of Aristide's political career was set remarkably early on in 1991, when after just eight months in power, Aristide was removed in a coup. As you’re about to hear, Aristide’s reformist agenda never recovered from the 1991...

Keir Starmer has been the leader of the UK Labour Party since 2020. This makes him Leader of the Opposition, and - if the polls are to be believed - Britain's next prime minister. Amid a revolving door of prime ministers, Brexit, and the pandemic, Starmer’s rise from leader of the weakest Labour Party since the Second World War to being in poll position in the race for Downing Street has take...

Afonso Dhlakama was the leader of RENAMO, Mozambique's main opposition movement, for over forty years until his death in 2018. Dhlakama’s story, and the Mozambican Civil War at large, are notable for two reasons. First is the regional and international dimension of the war. Mozambique's FRELIMO government courted support from communist powers such as East Germany but also became welcome...

J.R. Jayewardene served as prime minister and then president of Sri Lanka between 1977 and 1989. Sri Lankan history, politics and society is dominated by tensions between two ethnic groups. Ethnic divisions are intrinsic to countless countries, including many covered on this podcast before. The key question the Sri Lankan experience raises though is this: in stoking ethnic tensions, what is more i...

The Houthis, a Yemeni political and military organisation, have made headlines across the World since they began blocking the Red Sea nearly six months ago. But despite their association in people's minds with Gaza, and Iran's "Axis of Resistance", their true motives are poorly understood. This is the second half of a two-part conversation seeking to explain the Houthis' i...

The Houthis, a Yemeni political and military organisation, have made headlines across the World since they began blocking the Red Sea nearly six months ago. But despite their association with Gaza, and Iran's "Axis of Resistance", their origins in the turbulent Yemeni politics of the 1990s and 2000s are not widely understood. This is the first half of a two-part conversation seeking...

Jens Stoltenberg has been Secretary General of NATO since 2014, and prior to that served twice as Prime Minister of Norway.  Looking at him is interesting because, at least in the early part of his premiership, many commentators, buoyed by the end of the Cold War and the third wave of democratisation, genuinely believed that the world was converging on Norwegian attitudes towards democracy and int...

John Magufuli was the President of Tanzania between 2015 and 2021.  He was the sixth in a long line of presidents drawn from the same political party, the CCM, which has ruled Tanzania since its independence in 1961. CCM presidents came and went, standing down after two terms in office, just as American presidents do. But in the 2000s, the CCM started to lose popularity in Tanzania. Corruption sca...

Mary Lou McDonald has been the Leader of the Opposition to the Irish Government since 2020. She is also the leader of centre-left political party Sinn Fein, currently the second largest party in the Irish parliament (Dail). Since 2000, Sinn Fein has gone from being an extra-parliamentary party to being the most popular party in the Irish Republic, on course to win the next general election under M...

Nayib Bukele has been the President of El Salvador since 2019. He has transformed the country from the nation with the world's highest murder rate to that with the world's highest incarceration rate, having arrested more than 70,000 people (1% of the population) in less than two years. His programme presents complicated trade offs and moral dilemmas; how much of your freedom would you be...

Hezbollah is a Lebanese Shia Islamist militant group and political party, established in 1985. Hezbollah has a reputation as one of the Middle East’s great agitators, having engaged Israel in conflict twice, once in the 1980s and again in 2006. Their financing by and allegiance to the Iranian ayatollah, the West’s bogeyman in the region, underpins this image. But simply viewing Hezbollah as a regi...

Kim Yo Jong is the younger sister of the Supreme Leader of North Korea, Kim Jong Un.  Since Jong Un’s accession to power in 2011, he has placed his sister into positions of increasing importance domestically and increasing prominence internationally. The question is: is Jong Un following the advice of Michael Corleone, keeping his friends close but his enemies closer? Or is there genuine affection...

Hafiz al-Assad was the President of Syria between 1970 and 2000. Father of present Syrian leader Bashar, Hafiz inherited a country in disarray, beset by political and religious division at home, and subject to interference from regional powers.  Displaying extraordinary brutality, Hafiz imposed order on Syria’s diverse population and also turned his country into an important decision maker. His tr...

Alex Salmond was First Minister of Scotland between 2007 and 2014, during which time he led the unsuccessful referendum campaign for Scottish independence. Salmond was a ruthless political operator, who was difficult to pin down on the political spectrum. This made him the perfect candidate to spearhead the independence campaign, as he meant different things to different voters. This ambiguity can...

Islam Karimov was the 1st President of Uzbekistan from 1991 until his death in 2016.  Terrified by the economic devastation which gripped Russia in the 1990s, Karimov decided that he would rather close the door firmly on market economics if the transition towards it risked even slightly going the same way as Uzbekistan's former masters. And so, Uzbekistan fossilised. The state retained owners...

Geert Wilders is a Dutch politician and longtime leader of the Party for Freedom (PVV), now the Netherlands' largest political party, following a surprise victory in the country's November election.  Wilders has made a name for himself across Europe as the continent’s most outspoken anti-Islam politician. Marine Le Pen might be more powerful and more widely known, but her rhetoric pails...

Hun Sen is the longest-serving prime minister in Cambodian history, having led the country from 1998 until August this year. Hun has a complex legacy; he has ruled with a rod of iron, showing little mercy towards his political opponents. But as my guest today says, he is also the man who has taken Cambodia from the years of Pol Pot to the ambiguous modernity of the present. The Cambodia of 2023 ju...

Vytautas Landsbergis led the modern Lithuanian independence movement in the late 1980s and early 1990s.  Lithuania became the first of the fifteen Soviet Republics to declare independence from Moscow. This was a remarkably plucky move from such a small nation, but it changed the course of world history; two years later, Lithuania was an independent country, and the Soviet Union no longer existed....