Amid the current Covid-19 pandemic, organisation and clarity are king. Populist leaders' desire to tell their followers what they want to hear can be disastrous - and the consequences are immediately apparent. 

Populism is when one parent tells a child to eat her vegetables and do her homework, and the other parent says, ‘stuff that, just each chocolate and watch TV.’ The first parent argues that you should eat plenty of fruit and veg, and schoolwork is important for your future. The other parent says, ‘oh come on, you can’t believe everything so called experts say, school clearly doesn’t work because not everyone who went to school is successful in life, and look at those three famous millionaires who left school at 14.’

For a child, it’s tempting to go with the parent who says it’s ok to eat chocolate and stay up late watching TV. That parent will be popular right now, and will keep saying what the child wants to hear to retain that popularity. However, many years later, unemployed and riddled with diabetes, the former child will look back and realise it was the other parent who was right, and had her interests at heart all along.

Populism is quite easy. Populist leaders tell people what they want to hear, and consequently win their votes. Most of the time they can get away with it because it will take a long time for their voters to find out they were wrong. The populist leader will probably have died, retired, or become a dictator by the time enough people find out they were lying. But when an overnight catastrophe comes along, the shortcomings of populism become apparent immediately.

When an overnight catastrophe comes along, the shortcomings of populism become apparent immediately.

And that is the case with the pandemic. The connection between words, actions, and outcomes unfolds over days and weeks, rather than years or decades. Trump could talk about making America great again confident the economy would probably keep growing off the back of Obama’s previous work, and that some short-term policies would add to that to make it look strong enough to win the next election. Johnson would be long gone before the real, long-term impacts of Brexit became apparent. Bolsonaro is old enough to know that he can cut down the rainforests without climate change becoming a problem for him.

But this pandemic has reduced the action-outcome timeframe down to days and weeks. And success or failure is measured in very stark numbers that are almost impossible to spin or manipulate. Each country now has data on how many people have been infected, died, and become unemployed. These will become clearer over time, and soon will become historical facts. How the numbers are measured can be fiddled a bit, but in the end, deaths are deaths, and eventually they will all be counted. Even if testing cannot prove people died from Covid-19, if a lot more people die than usually die, that is hard to dodge. Dictatorships, like China and Russia, can bury the numbers along with the bodies, but even they are undermined by local activists using social media to document the reality. When a lot of people die, their relatives know. It is hard to make that go away.