PRAGMATIC ISSUES

There is a reason this image makes people recoil. It is not because it is rude, or partisan, or unfair.

It is because it collapses decades of denial into a single, unavoidable truth, much of the world’s current instability can be traced back to leaders who have stayed far too long, learned nothing new, and now govern from fear rather than vision.

This is not an attack on age, race, or nationality. Anyone reaching for that defense is already missing the point. The common denominator here is not identity.

It is power without an exit.

Across supposedly incompatible political systems, the same pattern keeps emerging. Leaders who once promised strength now fear consequences. Leaders who once claimed legitimacy now depend on loyalty tests.

Leaders who once spoke of national interest now confuse it with personal survival.

When power becomes the only shield against accountability, governance collapses into self-preservation.

The left likes to frame this as a foreign disease.

The right prefers to call it a necessary evil.

Both are wrong.

This pathology thrives wherever institutions are weak enough to be bent and voters tired enough to accept it.

Democracy does not fall to extremists first.

It falls to exhaustion, cynicism, and the lie that stability requires submission.

Experience is not wisdom when it is insulated from consequence. Longevity is not leadership when it crowds out succession. A system that relies on a single aging figure to prevent collapse is not strong. It is already hollow.

History shows this again and again.

When leaders stop preparing successors, they start preparing scapegoats.

When legitimacy fades, spectacle replaces policy.

When fear sets in, cruelty follows.

And the cost is never paid by those at the top.

Ordinary people absorb it through inflation framed as inevitability, wars justified as necessity, civil liberties dismissed as luxuries, and truth degraded into propaganda.

Institutions become stage props.

Courts become tools.

Elections become rituals emptied of meaning.

At that point, ideology no longer matters.

Only obedience does.

The most dangerous sentence in modern politics is “there is no alternative.” It is the rallying cry of every regime that has ever drifted from governance into domination. It teaches citizens to fear change more than corruption and to mistake endurance for competence.

It trains populations to accept decline as maturity.

This is why debates about personality, temperament, or media gaffes are distractions. The real scandal is structural. Systems that allow leaders and parties to rule indefinitely will always end this way.

Not because individuals and parties are uniquely evil, but because unchecked power corrodes without exception.

The final truth we refuse to say out loud is this, any political system that depends on elderly men from one party or another clinging to power to avoid consequences is already morally bankrupt.

When leaders fear retirement more than failure, prison more than war, and accountability more than chaos, they will sacrifice nations to save themselves.

That is not leadership. That is hostage-taking on a global scale.

And every citizen who excuses it because the strongman wears their preferred colors is no longer defending democracy.

They are helping to bury it.