我们的领导人怎么了？

我们的领导人怎么了？

近日，西蒙娜·薇依和赫尔穆特·科尔的相继去世令人不禁扼腕，这不免让我们想到，在如今这个空虚而愚蠢的年代里，我们似乎很难再找到令人敬佩的伟大领导人了。为什么会这样？我们的领导人究竟怎么了？

测试中可能遇到的词汇和知识：

reconciliation调和（和解，一致）[ˌrekənsɪli'eɪʃn]

sanitise消毒，使无害[ˌrekənsɪli'eɪʃn]

grotesque奇怪的，可笑的[ɡrəʊ'tesk]

lacerating被撕裂的，受伤的['læsəreɪt]

imbue灌输，使感染，使充满['læsəreɪt]

patronage赞助，任免权['pætrənɪdʒ/

apartheid种族隔离[ə'pɑːtaɪt]

arithmetic算术[ə'rɪθmətɪk]

vacuousness空虚，愚蠢[ə'rɪθmətɪk]

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.