The Freedom to Send a Leader Home

In Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić has conceded his party’s parliamentary defeat to a student-led opposition movement. In Brazil, Flávio Bolsonaro has refused to concede his defeat by Lula and demanded that the presidential election results be annulled. 12 One accepts a limit that the other contests. The difference matters. But beneath the conduct of the losing politician lies a question for the whole people: what have we allowed losing power to mean?

An election can remove someone from office. It cannot, by itself, teach a society that the officeholder and the country are different things. That distinction must already have some shelter in its laws, its habits, and its loves. Otherwise every succession becomes a threatened death, and every leader arrives promising to save the people from the existence of their neighbours.

I grew up under rulers whom we did not choose and could not send home. I do not regard the power to dismiss a ruler as a small achievement. Yet people can possess that power on paper while surrendering it in their imaginations. They begin to speak as though one man carries the nation’s life inside his body. His humiliation becomes their humiliation; his departure, their disappearance. He need not abolish their freedom all at once. He can persuade them that exercising it would be betrayal.

When my companions wanted greatness, I turned their attention toward service. This was not advice about appearing modest while retaining the best seat. It changed what greatness was for. The servant’s work is measured by what becomes possible for others, not by how helpless they become in his absence. A man who guards the household’s only key and calls himself indispensable has confused service with captivity.

This does not mean that experience is worthless or that every leader is interchangeable. Some people do difficult work very well. But their gifts become a public good only when others can question their use, learn from them, and eventually entrust the work elsewhere. If everything good must pass through one person’s hands, those hands have become a gate.

Consider the young people in West Africa who can vote and help drive political movements but remain ineligible to seek offices themselves. 3 There may be arguments about preparation and responsibility. Yet an arrangement deserves suspicion when it finds a person mature enough to authorise another’s rule but too immature to offer an alternative. The young are welcomed as strength for someone else’s arm. Their own hands must wait.

Serbia’s victorious movement faces a test beyond having won. Victory does not finish the work of liberation. Can its leaders endure being questioned by those who helped them prevail? Can gratitude remain gratitude, rather than becoming a debt collected at every subsequent election? A people may owe someone thanks without owing him their future. The liberator who cannot accept this has begun to inherit the ruler’s appetite.

There is a harder demand still: those who opposed the victory must retain a place among the people. Enemy-love is not affection for an opponent’s programme, nor an agreement to leave wrongdoing unpunished. It forbids making someone’s defeat a reason to cast them outside the circle of those whose lives count. Courts may judge acts; elections may remove officials. Neither should become a ceremony for declaring that a neighbour no longer belongs.

This cuts both ways. Forgiveness cannot require leaving someone in command. A steward may be forgiven and still surrender the keys. Nor should a former ruler need continued office merely to remain safe from vengeance. Where defeat threatens expulsion from common life, the struggle for office becomes a struggle never to let go. Institutions must restrain the winner as well as remove the loser.

Imagine the former leader going to buy bread. No procession, no trembling shopkeeper, no mob waiting to punish his presence. He waits his turn. Someone ahead of him voted against him; someone behind him still thinks he was right. He has lost the authority to command them. He has not lost his place in the queue.