The almost mordant wit of janan.ganesh@ft.com.
Newspaper Reader can almost embrace his practice?
Opinion: Geopolitics
Europe’s leaders have woken up to hard power
It isn’t clear that their electorates have done the same
https://www.ft.com/content/42a4531a-d50a-46f0-9a23-076c03b0da31
Mr. Ganesh as boulevardier loves to tease his readership! The first two paragraphs of Ganesh’ s essay are an evocative crowd scene:
Not enough is said about the other Donald T. Having led Poland between 2007 and 2014, Donald Tusk can take some credit as his nation approaches western European standards of living. Now in his second stint, Ukraine has no more vociferous friend in the world. Talk of Poland as the eventual heir to Britain — a pro-market, pro-American and martial voice in the EU — seems rash. It has around half the population and less diplomatic clout. But Tusk’s ease in those institutions as a former Brussels grandee narrows the gap.
Whatever Europe lacks as it tries to become a hard power, it isn’t leadership. Even aside from Tusk, Ursula von der Leyen has been a strong wartime president of the European Commission. With the zeal of a convert, Emmanuel Macron now sees the Kremlin is implacable. Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer are so as one on Ukraine that the subject never arises in British politics. As an Italian populist, Giorgia Meloni could be a Russia apologist. She isn’t. Even Olaf Scholz, the alleged ditherer, has seen Germany become easily Europe’s largest donor of military aid to Ukraine on his watch.
Then Ganesh actually begins his essay, after his baroque crowd scene, amounts to this:
The high politics aren’t perfect. There are always grounds for a tired metaphor about the Franco-German engine sputtering and so on. But these schisms add up to a rounding error next to the real problem, which is, I’m afraid, us.
Their are no ‘high politics’ except the one imagined by Ganesh. Who is the ‘us’ that he offers? Another 266 words and The Reader thinks she has arrived, with this sentence :
“Leaders must lead, not follow,” you will say, but that is always a dreamy view of politics.
The next paragraphs offers this:
This is the most overused word in politics. The extent to which the public are ever “led” against their preferences is overstated by romantics.
The penultimate paragraph this:
There is good news to be had. Europe is well-led (compare its main figures with America’s).
The final paragraph offers this:
The bad news is that leaders can only ever do so much against public sentiment. Scholz’s “historic turning point” took place in chancelleries. We don’t know if it took place in households. I can’t shake from my mind a quote attributed to another European leader, in another era, in another context. “We all know what to do. But we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it.”
Newspaper Reader