Cowen in top 10 of Newsweek’s respected leaders
But he found an ally yesterday in the shape of a respected international magazine which had nothing but praise for him.
“The Fiscal Taskmaster” was how Newsweek labelled Mr Cowen, including him in a list of 10 world leaders who “have managed to win serious respect”.
The polls would suggest otherwise. At the last time of asking, one in five Irish people approved of the job being done by Mr Cowen.
Just last month, he appeared to blame some of this on the domestic media, saying he’d had “enough” of “pervasive negativity”.
The Government had been proactive in confronting the challenges the country faced, he said, and he implored the media to “kindly get the real message out there”.
Newsweek seems to have listened, placing him in the same bracket as his fellow premiers Wen Jiabao (China), Manmohan Singh (India), Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (Brazil), David Cameron (Britain), Nicolas Sarkozy (France), King Abdullah (Saudi Arabia), Lee Myung-bak (South Korea), Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (Liberia) and Mohamed Nasheed (the Maldives), as leaders who have impressed.
Newsweek’s print edition even seemed optimistic about the Taoiseach’s long-term political future — noticeably more optimistic, in fact, than his own party, where dissatisfaction with Mr Cowen’s leadership appears to be growing.
“With Ireland’s economy staggering by the banking crisis, the prime minister is prescribing harsh medicine,” Newsweek wrote. “His drastic austerity packages have won greater admiration abroad than among his citizens — Cowen’s ratings have plunged. But if he engineers the turnaround many seem to expect, he’ll no doubt be rewarded in the long run.”
But Newsweek’s online edition — where the space restrictions don’t apply — offered a longer version of the text that was more restrained in its optimism.
“The Irish aren’t showing much gratitude — Cowen’s ratings have plunged to a mere 18%, and his Fianna Fáil party can expect a drubbing in the 2012 national elections. Still, there’s some hope that his Government’s unpopular measures will be rewarded in the long run: Surveys suggest that Irish consumer confidence is on the rise again, and the economy notched up modest growth in the first quarter of 2010.”
