A newly compiled dataset on political leadership suggests that the age gap between national executives and the populations they govern is widespread. Researcher Hannah Ritchie says three in four people worldwide live in a country whose principal leader is older than 65, while two in three live under a leader older than 70.
The compilation covers more than 140 countries and defines the leader as the person exercising the main executive authority. Depending on the political system, that can be a president, prime minister or monarch. Ritchie reports a global median leader age of about 64, but notes that regional patterns vary. Africa has the oldest regional median at close to 70, while Europe and South America are in the mid-50s.
Cameroon presents the dataset's widest gap. President Paul Biya is listed at 93 in a country with a median population age of 18. The 75-year difference combines an unusually old, long-serving leader with a very young population. Ritchie says Niger, Chad and the Democratic Republic of the Congo also have median population ages of about 16, contributing to large leader-public gaps across parts of Africa.
Children are included when calculating a country's overall median age, so some difference is inevitable because political leaders are adults. The disparity remains substantial when the comparison is restricted to adults, however. Ritchie's analysis puts leaders about 20 years above the median adult age on average and finds the leader older than the country's median in 129 of 143 cases. The Netherlands and Montenegro were the two exceptions identified.
Tenure and political systems also appear connected in the compilation. Using regime classifications from the V-Dem project, Ritchie found that none of the 25 liberal democracies in her sample had a current leader with more than ten years in office. Autocracies included multiple leaders with several decades in power. In Africa, the analysis classifies 31 of 41 covered countries as autocracies and says those countries account for eight of the continent's ten oldest leaders.
The figures require care because identifying the person with real executive power is not always straightforward. Saudi Arabia, for example, may be represented by King Salman in one dataset and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in another. Governments that control only part of a claimed territory create additional edge cases. Exact birth dates and changes in office can also affect a live comparison.
Ritchie presents the data as an exploratory resource rather than a final authority and invites corrections. The broad pattern is nonetheless consistent across most of the sample: political leadership is considerably older than the public, with the largest differences occurring where young populations coincide with long-serving rulers.
