Power's Old Tricks: Every Strongman Writes the Same Script
Abiy Ahmed's Prosperity Party has just won another overwhelming parliamentary majority in Ethiopia, defeating an opposition so fragmented it could barely constitute one.
Rob Jetten stood in Rotterdam and said sorry. Not for something abstract — for the specific, documented abandonment of Moluccan soldiers who fought under the Dutch flag, helped deliver Indonesian independence, and were then discarded like tools that had outlived their function. The monument behind him was crowdfunded, not state-commissioned. The families paid for their own memorial before the state paid for its own conscience.
That detail is worth sitting with.
Because this week, if you look across the political map of what we casually call the democratic world, what you find is a recurring structure: power consolidating, accountability arriving late or never, and ordinary people absorbing costs that were never theirs to carry.
Abiy Ahmed's Prosperity Party has just won another overwhelming parliamentary majority in Ethiopia, defeating an opposition so fragmented it could barely constitute one. Comfortable majorities in contexts with constrained civil society are not elections — they are ratifications. The international community will note the result, file it, and move on. Ethiopia needs stability, goes the logic. Stability, in this usage, means whoever is already in the room gets to stay there.
Across the North Sea, King Charles is preparing to disclose his personal tax bill — the first British monarch to do so, framed by Buckingham Palace as a gesture toward accountability. It is worth asking why this is news in 2026. The answer is embedded in the question: because it wasn't expected, because it wasn't required, because accountability for the powerful is still voluntary in enough places that voluntarily choosing it qualifies as news.
And in Australia, the Albanese government has approved new coal mining while the fuel tax credit scheme continues routing billions in diesel subsidies to multinational miners. The same government that campaigns on climate. The same budget that will tell nurses and teachers there isn't quite enough. The same logic, repeated in variation across democracies: the industries that can afford lobbying get policy; the people who need policy get speeches.
For Malta, the lesson isn't distant. We have watched public assets discussed in rooms where the public was not present. We have watched infrastructure decisions announced as faits accomplis. We have watched the language of accountability become a communications strategy rather than a practice. The Malta employment guide will tell you your rights as a worker. It cannot tell you who decided the rules.
What Rotterdam's crowdfunded monument tells us is something older and colder: when the state fails to remember, the people build the memory themselves, with their own money, on their own time, and the prime minister shows up afterward for the photograph.
Power is patient. It can always wait for the apology to become affordable.
