by Anura Guruge
on December 20, 2021

That is pretty young. It was his age, i.e., 35, rather than anything that caught my eye to begin with — even though the gratuitous ‘leftist‘ part did make me smile. Leftist is not always a bad thing. Some folks call ‘Bernie Sanders’ a leftist & he is, for the mots part, good & decent. But, let’s get back to the age.

35, coincidentally, is the STATED minimum age in order to be elected President in the U.S. or to be a Catholic bishop. [In the case of being U.S. President, that 35 refers, alas, to physical age rather than mental. I will leave it at that.]

Who was the youngest U.S. President is kind of a TRICK question. Depends whether you mean elected President or became President. At 43.65 years, ‘John F. Kennedy’ was the youngest elected. ‘Theodore Roosevelt’, who had been V.P., stepped into the Presidency when he was 42.88 years when ‘William McKinley’ was assassinated in 1901. So, the new Chilean President is much younger.

Wikipedia, bless them, has a list of the 10 youngest serving state leaders. Currently the youngest, at 27, is the Captain Regent of ‘San Marino’. [Coincidentally, I mentioned San Marino just last week in another post!] Then it is the Prime Minister of Finland — ‘Sanna Marin‘, who came to office when she was 34. That is impressive. New Zealand’s admirable ‘Jacinda Arden‘, who was elected when she was 37 is 8th on the Wikipedia list. She is quite the lady.

Wikipedia, alas, does NOT have the youngest ever! The best they can currently do is ‘from 1942‘. That is not that useful — PLUS the first 9 are all Kings. That doesn’t count. But, #10 is ‘Baby Doc’, viz. Jean-Claude Duvalier, of Haiti. Hhhmmm. He wasn’t elected & he was NOT a good man. He came to power when he was 19. I will, when I have time, dig into this more.

The youngest Prime Minister of the U.K. was the estimable ‘William Pitt the Younger‘, at age 24.5 in 1783.