The Times Magazine 43protesting about a fixed election in Belarus
(whose young opposition leader, Svetlana
Tikhanovskaya, is only able to broadcast from
safe-haven countries in the Baltics), Estonia is
home to a businessman who bankrolls Navalny
and is thought to have funded his film claiming
that Putin has built a vast personal palace.
So relations with the Kremlin are tetchy.
Kallas is tougher than many other European
leaders, advocating for stronger sanctions
on Russia. Following our interview, the EU’s
foreign minister, Josep Borrell, was given
an undiplomatic dressing-down on a visit to
Moscow by the bullish Russian foreign minister,
Sergei Lavrov. The visit was “badly thought
through and not a success, to put it mildly”,
Kallas noted tartly.
Does she expect to meet Putin herself
during her tenure? She does not look thrilled
at the prospect. “Only if there is something
to talk about and right now there does not
seem to be a genuine wish for dialogue.”
She reckons they may talk “at some point”.
A Putin meeting with Estonia’s President
Kersti Kaljulaid in 2019 was widely criticised
as naive. Would she have made a different
call? She sidesteps outright criticism of her
female counterpart but adds, “I firmly believe
in the Baltic states holding together and
European states acting in unison. It’s a serious
situation with Russia and we are better when
we have a unified front.”
It’s a reminder that for all the summits
and schmoozing of the international leaders’
club, the hard facts of a tense international
situation and the rise of strongmen-ruled
autocracies mean that female leaders can
not get by on speeches about human rights
and climate change alone. But there’s a
commonly held view that it’s the world’s
female leaders who have responded best
to Covid, the biggest public health crisis
since the influenza outbreak after the First
World War. How true is it? Like all sweeping
judgments, it depends what you are looking
for – and also what you aren’t.
New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern already
had liberal poster-person status for her easy,
open manner and empathetic handling of the
aftermath of the Christchurch terror attack.
A similarly straightforward approach saw her
win a landslide second term in last autumn’s
“Covid election”. But it is hard to make
a clear case on the superiority of women
leaders when a lot of calculations come
down to policy (and the good or bad luck
of geo-location and exposure). Those who
cite Ardern’s handling as an example of risk-
averse, female virtues tend not to be so
generous to Australia’s right-wing leader, Scott
Morrison, who instigated a similarly tough
approach to border controls and enforced
quarantine for visitors, stemming the flow
of outsiders travelling into the country.
The notion that women fare better
than mere men in handling Covid leans
strongly on emphasising the communication
talents of the best performers (Angela Merkel
and Ardern) – and downplaying failures
like Belgium, led by Sophie Wilmès and with
some of the highest death rates in Europe.
Criteria by which leaders were judged in the
early pandemic are now balanced by how
vaccination programmes are faring. On that
score, countries with male leaders – the US,
UK and Israel – seem to outperform the
others. Although in the UK another key
female presence, Kate Bingham, has provedan extraordinarily effective negotiator for
access to the early supply of vaccines. But the
reputations of both Ursula von der Leyen as
the EU Commission president and Angela
Merkel have taken a dent as EU vaccination
programmes have lagged.
There is also a structural conundrum that
is gender-blind – countries with low rates
of infection, like New Zealand, often find it
harder to enact mass vaccination programmes
that will ensure their rates stay low and,
ultimately, defeat the virus and its mutations.
Covid management, it turns out, is continuing
warfare against a devious viral foe rather than
achieving a quick victory parade.
And that raises another question that has
absorbed me over many years of meeting
female world leaders. How different are
they really to their male counterparts?
The old-school feminist claim that women
are less inclined to use force doesn’t always
stand up, for instance. Today, fewer female
leaders are in charge of countries waging
large-scale wars – but many are tied up
in military interventions. Angela Merkel
committed troops to Afghanistan as part
of the Nato mission; Theresa May was a
securocrat who had no desire to mess with the
UK’s residual deployments. Mette Frederiksen,
Denmark’s centre-left PM, agreed to increase
Denmark’s contribution to Nato air defences.
When it comes to less defensible chapters
in military history, plenty of powerful female
power-wielders either support or make
excuses for them. Serbia’s prime minister,
Ana Brnabic, is one of the most intriguing- and frustrating. Having interviewed and
talked to her a number of times, I always find
Brnabic to be gutsy and sophisticated – living
openly with her gay partner (they have a
son together) and joining Pride marches in
Belgrade. She’s also an Anglophile, having
studied economics at Hull University, and
tells me that, “I loved Depeche Mode. I was
obsessed with them as a girl and I still listen
to them with great memories of my student
days.” And she has a wicked sense of humour - regaling me with the story of how she
turned up in London for the West Balkans
conference in 2019, only to wait in vain to
meet the foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, who
had just resigned in a row with Boris Johnson.
“And,” she added mischievously, “people say
the Balkans have crazy politics.”
Yet Brnabic holds her position in Belgrade at
the behest of President Vucic, an unrepentant
propagandist for Slobodan Milosevic and his
regime as Yugoslavia dissolved into bloodshed
in the early Nineties. Inevitably, I clash with
Brnabic over her attitudes towards this period.
(I covered the brutal conflict for The Times
in the Nineties and subsequently gave
evidence on a massacre of Croats and Bosnian
civilians for a war-crimes tribunal against
THE ADVICE WAS WEAR TROUSERS, LOWER HER
VOICE. ‘IT SOUNDED LIKE, “BE MORE MASCULINE” ’
Angela Merkel with, right, the Serbian prime minister,
Ana Brnabic, at the Chancellery in Berlin, September 2019The prime minister of Norway, Erna Solberg, October 2019