Europe’s cult of political personality

The man is the message. Of the many lessons about contemporary European politics one can draw from Boris Johnson’s resounding election victory, the most important might also the most obvious: personality rules. Even though the election campaign left little doubt that the Brexit divide in the U.K. still runs deep, the one thing most Brits do appear to agree on is that for all his antics (or maybe because of them), they generally like Johnson. Polls in the run-up to the election consistently showed that the prime minister was better liked across almost all demographics than Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. Of course, likeability has always been a factor in voter choices. Yet in the past, Europe’s charismatic politicians (at least the democratic ones) were first and foremost representatives of an ideal, a political program and, above all, a party of the like-minded. In other words, they stood for more than a single issue, be it Brexit or opposition to migration. Think Margaret Thatcher, François Mitterrand, Helmut Kohl or Willy Brandt. Consider Johnson, who famously penned two versions of his Telegraph column in 2016 announcing his position on Brexit — one pro, one contra — as he plotted his path to power. Or take Emmanuel Macron’s hard-to-peg “movement,” originally called En Marche — with initials to match the leader's. The primacy of personality over ideology today is even reflected in language. Long gone are the days of the “Iron Lady,” a term of reverence for what many perceived as Thatcher’s rectitude and clarity of purpose. Europe’s new political stars sound more like members of the latest boy band, with breezy nicknames like “BoJo” (Johnson), “Basti” (Austrian conservative leader Sebastian Kurz), “Manu” (Macron) or “Il Capitano” (Matteo Salvini, leader of Italy’s far-right League). What’s given rise to such figures is the institutional decline of Europe’s old political parties, says Josef Janning, a veteran German political analyst. The failure of mainstream parties to effectively address voter concerns about such intractable issues as globalization, technology and migration created an opening. Europe’s upstart politicians were quick to exploit it by presenting themselves as iconoclasts willing to upend the status quo, whether from within establishment structures, as with Johnson and Kurz; or from the outside, like Macron, who abandoned France’s Socialist Party to start his movement, and Salvini, who has refashioned Italy's Lega into a national force. Fearing political oblivion, former Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi fled the stalwart center-left Democratic Party this fall to start a movement with the catchy name “Italia Viva.” Freed of the constraints of a traditional party structure, Renzi has tried to put himself back in the limelight. “They all have the quality of the maverick about them,” Janning said. Instead of values, their politics are driven by focus groups, polls and social media. In most cases, they cling to their signature issue, as Kurz and Salvini have done with migration, for example, and Johnson with Brexit. Johnson, channeling U.S. President Donald Trump’s successful formula, eschews specifics in favor of mythology, selling Brexit as a way to return to the U.K.’s supposed glory days and casting himself as a modern-day Winston Churchill. Not so long ago, questions about the private lives and morals of Johnson and Trump would have ruled them out as leaders of their parties. Now the grass-roots are not only willing to ignore such questions, they embrace their leaders with rare fervor. Today's political mavericks share another quality as well — ruthlessness. For decades, Europe’s establishment parties functioned like successful blue-chip companies, recruiting the best and brightest early and then promoting them gradually into senior positions.

In most cases, becoming the head of government was the culmination of a decades-long political career. No more.