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Confidence in world leadersConfidence in world leaders
About the author
Ryan Neelam
Ryan Neelam was Director of the Public Opinion and Foreign Policy Program at the Lowy Institute. He led the flagship annual Lowy Institute Poll, was project director for the Global Diplomacy Index, and wrote about climate diplomacy and multilateral policy.
Low levels of trust in China align with a lack of confidence in President Xi Jinping. Only 12% of Australians say they have ‘some’ or ‘a lot’ of confidence in President Xi ‘to do the right thing regarding world affairs’, steady from last year.
Australians continue to hold the least confidence in North Korean leader Kim Jong-un (4%), closely followed by Russian President Vladimir Putin (7%), both steady from last year.
By contrast, Australians tend to have more confidence in the leaders of liberal democracies, with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (65%), Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, and French President Emmanuel Macron (both 61%) topping the list of 12 leaders.
However, confidence in the leaders of some democracies dropped markedly. Australians’ confidence in Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy dropped 12 points to 60%, after he topped the list of leaders last year. Confidence in UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak fell seven points to 56%, aligning with the lowest rating for his predecessor Boris Johnson (55%) in 2020. US President Joe Biden dropped 13 points to 46%, a new low for him on this measure, but still 16 points above Australians’ peak confidence rating for former president Donald Trump (30% in 2020). Confidence in Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi fell by seven points to 37%.
In March, as this Poll went to field, Indonesian President Joko Widodo was nearing the end of his term in office. Despite enjoying record high approval ratings at home, Australians’ confidence in President Widodo has remained consistently low, with only 33% expressing any level of confidence in him this year. A considerable proportion (18%) say they do not know who he is.
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, included in this question for the first time, also received a lacklustre 41% confidence rating, with similarly significant numbers (19%) saying they do not know who he is.
