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he question of leadership often carries with it the elegiac burden of the myths of the golden age. "There are no leaders like there used to be," we say, as we inwardly compare the image of a victorious Churchill with that of Cameron feeding a calf. The nostalgia for leaderships, however, can go beyond reproaching the present or the need for a moral anchor that brings congruence to the complexity of our days. Thus, in praising Robert Schuman and the promoters of the Treaty of Rome, we give an intelligible —and useful— epic of legitimation to the best of the world we have known: the EU itself and the post-war consensus. And, even when leadership has no less to do with a given institutionality and the correlation of forces of a political cycle, its referents still serve us to raise an archetype of exemplarity: public virtues, gravitas, audacity, pulse of the country and vision of the historical circumstance, generation of trust, etc. In short: without having yesterday's leaders in mind, we would know less how today's leaders should be.
For the purposes of a liquid world, a reminder is not out of place: leadership still matters. Welcoming refugees, resisting "bailouts" or calling a referendum were —ultimately— decisions of the responsibility of Merkel, Rajoy and Cameron. Therefore, the question of leadership is always the question of its quality. In fact, there is no shortage of new leaders: let us remember, in just a few years, and without leaving Spain, cases such as those of Rivera, Iglesias or Colau. And we can even appreciate some irony: after years of demanding stronger leaderships in Europe, some of its protagonists —from Mélenchon to Grillo or Le Pen— have managed to inspire more fear than trust. The case of the United States presents its own paradoxes: Obama and Trump are antithetical characters, but their gestation has parallels in the humus of digital society and spectacularized politics. Also, in the permeability of a party system that —as we see in the transition from Democrat to Republican— knows its ambivalences.
We do not live in a more difficult world than sixty years ago: that political generation had—literally—to raise Europe from its ruins. But there has been no "end of history" and perhaps we are facing a more complex world. We see this in the pitfalls when it comes to establishing leadership today. The fragmentation of societies—countryside/city, older/younger—prevents common narratives and meeting points. The discomfort of the crisis has been a political premium for opportunists. Globalization—the European Union itself—erodes the scope of purely national leaderships. Public conversation, as it is substantiated on networks and amplified on televisions, intensifies our known tendency towards primary responses, whether in the eagerness for novelty, the excessive weighting of charisma, the scrutiny of politicians' personal lives, or the decrease in attention to complex discussions. And, above all, we encounter the loss of authority of instances that—like the press or political parties—until now were useful for mediating between politics and civil society.
If for a time we lamented the political apathy of citizens, now the traits of their hyper-politicization can be concerning. In the current predilection for a leader, there are traits of selfie, narcissism, or a free buffet: after leading the French socialists to catastrophe, Hamon announced a new political platform, as Mélenchon had done in his time. The Spanish PSOE has also experienced dispersions close to fracture in recent years, just like Podemos between Errejonistas and Pablistas. In this "serve yourself" it can happen—as in Macron's case—that a leader without a party is chosen—and, therefore, less of a leader. A common trait of a certain romanticism that, surprisingly, still beats in our time: the appreciation for the rebel, for the outsider, for the maverick. Let's not rule out that there is something of a replica there to one of the problems of traditional parties: the lack of meritocracy in the selection of their cadres.
Hyper-politicization comes hand in hand with an unprecedented faith in politics. And yet, here there is also room for paradox. Indeed, despite so many "alpha" candidates and so many hyper-leaderships, reality seems to have rewarded modest leaders—let's put it that way. Merkel has not caused, among European conservatives, the emotions that Cameron provoked. It was Monti and Renzi—not Rajoy—who graced the covers of Time, before being swallowed by the drain of history. It can even be argued that Van Rompuy's grayness has been more effective in a Europe in crisis than Juncker's colorfulness in post-crisis Europe. A certain British observer once expressed his astonishment at the grayness of some successful premiers, from Salisbury to Clement Atlee. Counterintuitive as it may seem, the modest will inherit the earth and can also win elections.