Opinion
by Panos Tsiridis
The most compelling argument for our political leaders to grasp the value of immediacy is this: governments no longer fall because of the opposition.
First of all, politicians are smart people. Smarter than average. You don’t become a successful politician without being intelligent, alert, and possessing some measure of empathy for those around you. From personal experience, I can vouch that, contrary to the populist trend, the vast majority of our politicians are neither sellouts nor corrupt nor indifferent. On the contrary, many have genuinely good intentions for the country, something not incompatible with personal ambition, drive, or even vanity. Something “human, all too human.”
In today’s Western democracies, caught in a spiral, with parliaments constantly renewing themselves, being a “politician” is now more of a role and less of a caste, as it once was. Why then do today’s politicians, who generally possess these valuable traits, fail so spectacularly at managing crises?
An easy answer: they don’t know how. Malcolm Gladwell’s rule may not always hold, but it’s telling, roughly 10,000 hours of training and practice are needed to become good at something. In large corporations, crisis manuals, executive training, and regular drills on handling crises are the norm. Why? Because those affected are unforgiving. In today’s social media age, within hours, you need the face and the courage to step forward, take responsibility, show empathy, and promise to do everything possible to fix what went wrong and prevent it from happening again. Hard, yes, but simple.
This logic pushes our politicians out of their comfort zones. The dominant political culture of the past 10–20 years was shaped by a societal need for consensus and averages. Politicians weren’t elected so much for what they stood for (if they stood for anything at all), but for how they appeared: calm, gentle, passionless, non-confrontational, apolitical in speech, with an agenda of perpetual compromise. All of that goes out the window during a crisis and in this new climate of insecurity, which demands strength, resolve, quick decisions, combativeness, and determination. It’s hard for the same people to suddenly wear new hats. It requires a huge leap of faith.
The strongest argument for our leaders to embrace immediacy is this: governments no longer collapse because of the opposition. They collapse because of crises. And crises are inevitable. Yet, it is not impossible to emerge stronger from them. Citizens judge their leaders by how they handle crises.
A timeless example of successfully “leveraging” a crisis is the remarkable comeback of German Chancellor Schröder, who, just two weeks before the 2002 elections, was trailing by 5–7 points. The cause of his unexpected victory? His effective management of the devastating floods that hit eastern Germany at the time.
Closer to today: the Canadian government was floundering in early 2025, an election year, lagging by as much as 25 points. But the party’s new leader, Carney, managed to capitalize on President Trump’s aggressive rhetoric on tariffs and annexations, keeping his party in power in one of the most spectacular comebacks in modern political history.
We’re not asking our politicians to become Churchills, who, just three days after assuming office during the Nazi invasion of Belgium and the Netherlands, declared, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” There’s no need to go that far, at least not yet. A good first step is to show they are taking responsibility and control of the situation. Otherwise, in this new age of uncertainty, they will resemble Zacharias Papantoniou’s parrot:
“Mr. Parrot, will we be lucky enough to hear you say anything more?”
The parrot coughs, clears his throat…but what to say?
He repeats, “Good evening.”
Mr. Panos Tsiridis is a communications consultant.
