Why Do Politicians Refuse to Retire?
Humanity fought very hard since the eighteenth century to gain the prize of retirement after several decades of hard work. Hard workers such as mines and manufacturers granted pensions to their oldest employees because aging bodies inevitably decreased productivity. Modern societies built upon those struggles to offer rest across every industry. Despite this progress, politics has always been an exception to the rule. It’s a concerning fact that we’re still governed by a global gerontocracy. This concept describes a political system in which a country or political entity is ruled by older people. The Romans had the Senate, whose Latin etymology is defined as “old man”. Two thousand years later, the literal definition still dictates policy.
What kind of example are those leaders setting for our youth by continuing to rule an entire country when they could be enjoying the final years of freedom in their lives? Yet they refuse to leave. Paul Biya (Cameroon) is 93 years old, Donald Trump (USA) is 80, Lula da Silva (Brazil) is 80, Netanyahu (Israel) is 76, and Erdogan (Turkey) is 72, and the list could go on. The global average retirement age sits at 63. Belgium pushes it to 67, and Libya to 70. China allows exit at 60, while Colombia drops it to 57. The men running the world are decades past the point where the State would trust them to operate machinery.
Mary Kate Cary, an adjunct professor with the University of Virginia’s Department of Politics, said that public servants, most likely politicians cling to their job for different reasons: they’re afraid of boredom or the looming certainty of death; or they’re deeply bonded to the maintenance of power and terrified to lose influence. Lula da Silva is in his third presidential campaign in Brazil against Jair Bolsonaro’s son, Flavio, is 45 years old. The left in Brazil, mirroring the Democrats in the United States, repeatedly fails to produce younger candidates to counter the rise of far-right figures. Well, the Dems are offering Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (36) or Zohran Mandani (34) who’s the current New York major, as potential runners to confront the MAGA movement's relentless idiocracy. Needless to say, they also represent old ideals. What’s really new rather than Socialism or Capitalism?
On the other side of the ideological river, far-right and right movements across the planet have conquered younger voices. Latin America and the US are proof of this: Nayib Bukele (48), Abelardo De La Espriella (48), Javier Milei (55), JD Vance (42). These young almost millennial figures are supposed to be more aligned with socioeconomic progress, climate change awareness and distance itself from political incompetence. Instead, these individuals default to a narcissistic, mediatic showmanship. They discard their intellect entirely for the sake of acquiring power. They mimic the older generation, looking in the mirror and seeing an eighteenth-century general destined to rule forever. Bukele set the authoritarian template, and politicians like De La Espriella are eager to follow his steps.
Anyway, rules must apply to any profession. We acknowledge that dangerous physical labor in mines or warehouses is entirely unfit for the elderly. Intellectual labor requires the exact same standard. A standard desk job demands a sharp mind and physical endurance to manage emails and eternal meetings. Donald Trump frequently delivers speeches where he fails to complete a single coherent sentence. It’s absurd that the most delicate decisions in domestic and foreign policy are entrusted to useless men who can barely walk or speak.
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