When Leadership Places Itself Above the Rules...

Reflections on leadership, democratic erosion, and why silence allows systems of power to shape the narrative.

It has been a while since I last wrote here. This is not because there hasn’t been anything to say, but because there has been too much. The past few months have felt like a relentless stream of crises, injustices, and contentious debates. At a certain point, the volume of information alone becomes exhausting.

Across many of the political, institutional, and social issues we are witnessing, the same question keeps surfacing: 'What happens when leadership begins to believe the rules apply to everyone except them?'

Not merely bending rules for political strategy — something long recognised in what political theorists call realpolitik — but something more troubling. A situation where scrutiny is treated as illegitimate, dissent is framed as disloyalty, and accountability becomes optional for those in power. When that happens, institutions do not collapse overnight. Instead, something subtler occurs.

The rules remain written, the structures still exist, but their authority slowly erodes because those responsible for upholding them begin to stand outside them.

Recently, two things I read made me reflect more deeply on this. The first was a post written by a member of the LinkedIn community working in the legal profession whose family lives in Iran. They write intentionally about the country and its politics, yet reflected on how disconcerting it can feel to analyse a system that your own family is living through in real time. Despite that discomfort, they explained why continuing to write matters.

Discourse keeps attention on the lived experiences of people who are subjected to violence, repression, and systemic injustice. Silence, on the other hand, allows power to shape the narrative uncontested.

The second was an interview where the interviewee described what I would call anticipatory grief for democracy. The idea that people are already grieving the erosion of democratic norms before democracy has formally collapsed.

Democratic decline rarely arrives with a clear announcement. It happens gradually — through small shifts in behaviour, expectations, and leadership norms. Leaders begin to treat scrutiny as hostile rather than necessary. Institutions become tools for protecting power rather than checking it. Legal systems are expected to resolve problems that are fundamentally political and moral in nature. Over time, accountability becomes selective and once accountability becomes selective, democracy becomes fragile.

We often reassure ourselves that the courts will intervene, that the law will ultimately correct the imbalance. But legal systems cannot carry the weight of democratic preservation alone. Laws are only as strong as the political culture that sustains them. When leadership culture normalises exemption from scrutiny, institutions struggle to hold the line.

Which brings us back to responsibility. Democratic societies rely on constitutions and legal frameworks as well as a shared commitment to questioning power. That responsibility does not sit exclusively with judges, journalists, or elected officials. It belongs to all of us.

• To remain engaged in discourse.

• To question leadership decisions when they contradict the values they claim to uphold.

• To challenge systems that concentrate power without accountability.

• To recognise when silence begins to serve the status quo more than stability.

Not everyone has the same platform, influence, or safety in doing so. That reality matters. But, whatever voice we have, large or small, still contributes to shaping the culture that surrounds power.

Perhaps the most dangerous moment for any democracy is not when institutions fail entirely but instead, when people begin to assume that someone else will protect them. Democratic systems do not sustain themselves automatically. They endure because people insist that the rules apply equally — especially to those who hold power.

Leadership, at its best, is not about exemption from the rules. It is about being accountable to them.