What Europe’s comeback politicians can teach American voters

Sending previously discharged leaders back to the top job is not an exclusively European habit: Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was president of Brazil from 2003 to 2011 before returning last year. Abe Shinzo reclaimed the Japanese prime ministership in 2012 for eight years having first held the post in 2006. But Lazarus-style leaders are so common in the European Union that three of its 27 governments—in Hungary, Slovakia and Poland—are currently run by such returnees, with more putative round-trippers waiting in the wings. Bar Germany, Spain and a couple of others, all EU countries have been led by a politician who lost, then regained, office on at least one occasion within living memory. Americans in contrast have not yielded to the temptation of the tried-and-previously-discarded since Grover Cleveland in 1892. Stateside politicians routed at the polls prefer to go off to write their memoirs and pocket large speaking fees. Plenty in Europe spend their involuntary unemployment plotting their return instead (and earning large speaking fees, why not?).