The Hated and the Dead

Angela Merkel served as Chancellor of Germany from 2005 until 2021. This impressive tenure makes her the second longest-serving Chancellor since the Second World War. Merkel’s time in power was characterised by a series of major crises. Over Merkel’s sixteen years as Chancellor, the World became a much scarier and more unstable place. This conversation deals mainly with Merkel’s handling of four c...

The Kaczyński Brothers, Lech and Jarosław, have exerted considerable influence over the politics of Poland for more than twenty years. Lech served as President from 2005 until his death in a plane crash in 2010, and Jarosław served as prime minister in 2006 and still leads the Law and Justice party (PiS in Polish) to this day. As my guest today explains, the plane crash of 2010 which claimed Lech&...

Ali Khamenei has been the Supreme Leader of Iran since 1989, and previously served as President in the 1980s. This podcast is released at what appears to be a moment of mounting crisis for the Islamic regime, with protests across the country going into their seventh consecutive week.  Domestically, Khamenei's time as leader has been characterised on the one hand by consolidation of the regime...

Sweden Democrats are the first far-right party in Sweden’s parliament. Unlike Britain's UKIP or Spain's Vox, both of which split off from mainstream conservative parties, the Sweden Democrats’ origins in fascism and the fringes of Swedish political thinking is well-documented.  First entering parliament in 2010, Sweden Democrats, led by the bespectacled Jimmie Akesson, now support a righ...

Mikhail Gorbachev was the last leader of the Soviet Union, and I’ve yet to cover any single person who has exerted a bigger effect on the world we live in today than him. When he died in August this year, the outpouring of grief for the 91-year-old in the West was immense; he was heralded as the man who ended the Cold War, and, through his signing of a 1987 nuclear treaty with Ronald Reagan, as th...

Isaias Afwerki, usually known as Isaias, is Eritrea’s only ever President, having served in the role since 1993. After rising through the ranks of Eritrea’s liberation movement during a thirty-year war for independence against Ethiopia, Isaias has instituted a colossal centralisation of power around himself; Eritrea has no free newspapers, no constitution, no parliament; it doesn’t even have a for...

Hassan al-Turabi is arguably the most important figure in Sudan's independent history.  Whilst never technically leading the Northeast African country, he influenced successive Sudanese regimes, and was frequently referred to as the “power behind the throne” in the first ten years of the leadership of Omar al-Bashir. Turabi’s role in slowly imposing Sharia Law on the Sudanese people and insti...

Viktor Orban has been prime minister of Hungary since 2010, and previously served in that role from 1998 until 2002. In that first stint as Hungarian leader, Orban passed without comment in European Union circles, but his second premiership has seen him come up against the EU on issues related to the rule of law, LGBT rights, and the 2015 migrant crisis.  Orban is now fully fledged right-wing popu...

Lula da Silva is a candidate for the 2022 Brazilian Presidential Election, taking place today. He previously served as President of Brazil between 2003 and 2010. On the face of it, his achievements as President are hard to criticise, whatever your political leanings. On the one hand, he oversaw a massive increase in the Brazilian median income. On the other, he slowed the deforestation of the Amaz...

There have been demands for greater autonomy for Scotland within the UK since the country joined the Union in 1707, but it was only in 1997- 25 years ago this month- that Scotland finally got its own parliament.  1997 was the culmination of a long struggle for self-government led by a group of people in Scotland, some left-wing, others right, many non-descript. These people, the devolutionists, ar...

Xi Jinping, the world's most powerful man, seemed like a good fit for the 50th episode of the podcast. Thank you to all of you who have stuck by the Hated and the Dead for its first half-century; there's plenty more to come.  Xi has been President of the People's Republic of China since 2012. In a few weeks time, he is set to embark on an unprecedented third term as China's lea...

Jacinda Ardern has been prime minister of New Zealand since 2017. Ardern is a good example of how an affable, anodyne politician can pursue highly divisive and polarising policies. Ardern’s premiership has been defined by her response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Whilst New Zealand’s initial response to the pandemic in 2020 was praised across the world, and saw Ardern win a landslide election victory...

Tsai Ing-wen has been President of Taiwan since 2016. A member of the Democratic Progressive Party, Tsai is in effect the leader of liberal Taiwan, with her party broadly promoting the idea of Taiwanese identity. In doing so, she faces two opponents. Domestically, she faces the Kuomintang, or KMT, which seeks to reunify Taiwan with mainland China. Tsai also of course faces mainland China, known as...

Alberto Fujimori fue presidente del Peru entre 1990 y 2000. Aunque casi todos los comentaristas políticos describen Fujimori como un president de la derecha, su campana de 1990 fue más ecléctico que ideológico. Sin embargo, no se puede negar que Fujimori adoptó una perspectiva derechista para solucionar los problemas económicas y sociales que sufrió Peru durante los años ochenta, y es esta perspec...

Davíð Oddsson served as prime minister of Iceland between 1991 and 2004. However, Oddsson wasn't just prime minister; he also served as Mayor of Reykjavik, Governor of Iceland’s Central Bank, and as the editor of Iceland’s biggest newspaper.  Whilst he didn’t serve in these positions at the same time, there was a clear attempt by Oddsson, over a period of many decades, to get his friends and...

Mahathir Mohamad served as prime minister of Malaysia between 1981 and 2003, and again between 2018 and 2020. Today’s episode in part examines the implications of being governed by the very old; Mahathir was 93 when he returned to power in 2018.  Ethnic tensions are intrinsic to Malaysian history and politics. A mix between Malays, Chinese and Indians, the majority Malay population, reeling after...

Populist Pim Fortuyn cannibalised the 2002 Dutch general election with flamboyant campaigning and hostility to Islamic immigration. Nine days before the election, he was assassinated by a left-wing animal rights activist. In a country with a political culture as gentle as the Netherlands, Fortuyn’s murder sent shockwaves through the country.  Fortuyn is an important figure because he represents th...

Aung San Suu Kyi became one of the most recognisable people in the world in the 1990s and 2000s during long periods under house arrest in her native Myanmar. Released in 2010, her image as an icon of democracy, resilience and human rights has been tainted by her apparent ambivalence towards the military-sponsored ethnic cleansing (some say genocide) of Myanmar's Rohingya Muslim minority. My g...

Tony Abbott was Prime Minister of Australia from 2013 until 2015. A brilliant and ruthless Leader of the Opposition, Abbott's blunt and confrontational style fell flat as prime minister. After just two years in charge, Abbott was deposed by Malcolm Turnbull, leaving office as the most unpopular Australian PM of modern times. Abbott’s brief premiership represents part of what today’s guest cal...

Urho Kekkonen served as President of Finland between 1956 and 1982. Kekkonen towered over the Finnish political system, creating a complex system whereby he co-opted his potential adversaries into an ever-larger coalition, such that at election time, he was safe from serious political opposition. Early on in his political career, Kekkonen decided that faced with a much larger much stronger neighbo...

Nikola Gruevski served as the prime minister of North Macedonia between 2006 and 2016. Gruevski became prime minister on a wave of anti-elite sentiment in a country that was only 15 years old. Whilst initially pro-Western in outlook, Gruevski, and his right-wing party VMRO, became increasingly irritated by the Western powers’ ambivalence towards Macedonia, and began making not-so-furtive gestures...

Bashar al-Assad has been President of Syria since 2000. His time in power has been overshadowed by a dreadful civil war that started in Syria in 2011 and is still ongoing.  Bashar has attracted both the ire and the support of various international powers, with the Western alliance putting increasing pressure on regime to make concessions to the Opposition, but Vladimir Putin’s Russia seeking to ga...

Leonid Brezhnev was the leader of the Soviet Union from 1964 until his death in 1982. Cautious and ideologically vacuous, Brezhnev remains a mystery, despite a lengthy rule. Under him, the Soviet Union descended into corruption and economic stagnation, and paved the way for the era of reform under Mikhail Gorbachev. Arguably, the Brezhnev era represented the beginning of the end of the Soviet Unio...

Warlord-turned-politician Charles Taylor served as President of Liberia from 1997 until his resignation in 2003.  While on trial for war crimes in the Hague, the court heard of Taylor forcing his soldiers to practice cannibalism on their enemies, among other heinous crimes- an attitude towards violence encapsulated in his 1997 campaign slogan, “he killed my ma, he killed my pa, but I’ll vote for h...

Kurt Waldheim served as President of Austria from 1986 until 1992. During the presidential campaign of 1986, revelations about Waldheim's service for the Nazis in Greece and Yugoslavia came to light, with Waldheim eventually admitting he had previously downplayed his actions in the Second World War. The Waldheim Affair triggered a period of collective reflection in Austria on the country&apos...