Politics round-up — strongmen and a delicate democracy

There will be a great many books written about Russia’s war on Ukraine. Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin and Russia’s War Against Ukraine by Owen Matthews (Mudlark £25/$29.99) is a vivid and revealing first draft of history. The author is a journalist with many years of experience in Moscow. The strength of his account lies in his ability to tell the story from many angles, weaving them into a single, fast-paced narrative. Matthews offers a convincing (though necessarily unverifiable) account of the viewpoints from the Kremlin and the presidential office in Ukraine.

For Matthews, Putin’s miscalculation is partly the story of how an ultranationalist and paranoid theory of world affairs moved from the fringes of Russian society into the president’s office. His account of the evolution of Volodymyr Zelenskyy is also a fascinating reminder that the Ukrainian president was originally a politician who stood for conciliation with Russia.

As Matthews and others have pointed out, Putin’s overconfidence stemmed in part from an exaggerated sense of the weakness and decadence of western society. The chaotic withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan probably influenced his thinking — as well as the growing polarisation of politics in both Europe and the US.

Michael Reid, a former Madrid correspondent for The Economist, offers a comprehensive and engaging account in Spain: The Trials & Triumphs of a Modern European Country (Yale University Press £18.99/$30) of one large, European democracy. Reid first visited the country in 1971 and later witnessed the economic, cultural and international resurgence of Spain, after democracy was restored and the country joined the EU.

But the story Reid tells is about a nation that seems to be losing its way. He describes the range of problems now troubling the country: a prolonged economic downturn, political polarisation, declining international influence and the resurgence of regional separatism, in particular in Catalonia. Reid takes a more jaundiced view of Catalan nationalism than some foreign observers, linking the movement to other populist, anti-establishment movements, such as Brexit and Trumpism.

That Reid is a level-headed and sympathetic observer of Spain gives his downbeat conclusions even more force. As he sees it, “Spain risks gradually coming apart”. Unless democratic politicians can bring about real change, the patience of Spanish voters “may snap”.

The reason that Spain’s difficulties have not garnered more international attention is partly a tribute to the fact that many of its democratic neighbours are going through even more dramatic crises. The US had the storming of Congress on January 6 2021. Britain is struggling after Brexit. France has gone through successive waves of violent civil unrest. Italy’s new prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, hails from a far-right political party.

Given this range of pathologies, it is little wonder that there is now a vogue for “strongman leaders” who promise to cut through the difficulties and dysfunctionalities of modern democracies.

Charles Dunst’s new book, Defeating the Dictators: How Democracy Can Prevail in the Age of the Strongman (Hodder & Stoughton £25), offers a programme for revitalisation of troubled democracies. At a time when much rhetoric in the US is focused on the international arena, Dunst is surely right to emphasise the importance of democratic regeneration at home. After all, “victory” in the cold war was achieved not through force of arms but because the western model was so much more robust and attractive than the Soviet alternative.

Dunst argues for more meritocracy to increase social mobility. He wants greater accountability, to see powerful wrongdoers brought to justice. He wants more robust social-safety nets; incentives for politicians to think long-term; more investment in infrastructure, and politicians who are willing to communicate the economic benefits of migration.

Most centrist politicians in western democracies would probably agree with almost all of that list. The reason these things don’t get done is not because of a failure of analysis — or even a lack of political courage. Modern democracies often seem structured to thwart the kind of sensible reforms that Dunst advocates.

All of that leads to the authoritarian temptations that Defeating the Dictators identifies. But strongman systems have their own pathologies and are perhaps even more prone to catastrophic errors. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine illustrates that. So does Chinese president Xi Jinping’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, which combined secrecy, authoritarianism and, finally, a panicky reversal of the “zero-Covid” policy on which he had staked so much.

The Chinese Communist party has an Orwellian ability to rewrite history, which makes accounts of the pandemic in China, such as Deadly Quiet City by Murong Xuecun (Hardie Grant £14.99/New Press $27.99), invaluable. This compelling book, which focusses on Wuhan, the original epicentre of the pandemic, has a novelistic quality, with each chapter detailing a single individual’s story, from a motorcycle taxi driver to a hospital doctor. The result is a revealing and often horrifying portrait of a callous and dysfunctional state.

Gideon Rachman is the FT’s chief foreign affairs commentator

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