Why leaders are so old in such a young world
And how it impacts people’s faith in governments and the decisions they make
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—very old leaders.
It isn’t because voters dislike young candidates. As Aksel Sundström, political scientist at the University of Gothenburg and co-author of Youth Without Representation, pointed out in a recent TV discussion: “It’s very expensive to run as a candidate for politics. So it’s not really that voters do not want young leaders, but it is something in the systems that makes it inherently difficult to become elected.”