Why leaders are so old in such a young world
And how it impacts the decisions taken by governments and people's faith in them
By Sanjay Dubey
Take a look around global politics today and an obvious disconnect jumps out: the average world leader is 63 years old, while the median age of the global population is just 30. There are exceptions, of course—like Nepal’s 36-year-old Prime Minister Balen Shah, or 38-year-old leaders in Iceland, Burkina Faso, and Ecuador. But the broader trend leans heavily toward gerontocracy.
At the extreme end sit rulers governing populations a fraction of their age, like Cameroon’s Paul Biya at 93 or Saudi Arabia’s King Salman at 90. Yet this isn’t just an authoritarian habit. Major democracies show the exact same pattern. Donald Trump governs in his 80s, and India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi serves in his late 70s.
In almost any other field, this would look strange. Boardrooms rarely hire 80- or 90-year-olds to run major corporations, yet politics remains uniquely open to—and dominated by—governance into extreme old age.
So why, in a world where over half the population is young, does formal power stay so old?