The class of 2024

Donald Tusk

The wind of change

For two decades, two men have waged a battle for Poland’s soul. In the blue corner, fighting for a democratic, modern, European vision of the future: Donald Tusk, a former prime minister who served as president of the European Council before returning as leader of the centrist opposition; in the red corner, duking it out for the traditionalists, the Catholic conservatives, the nationalists: Jarosław Kaczyński, leader of the ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS). Each man has had a chance to shape Poland in his image, only to have the other wind back the clock. Now, after eight years of Kaczyński, the country is on the cusp of a new age of Tusk, and the wind of change is blowing once more.

1. Giorgia Meloni

The chameleon

Giorgia Meloni’s ascendancy to the Italian premiership last year sent a shiver down the spines of centrists across the Continent and beyond. Brussels braced for a member of a post-fascist party getting a seat (and a vote) at its top tables, bolstering the ranks of the EU’s problem children. Kyiv prepared for Italy to break from the pack and seek to soften support for Ukraine and wind back Russia sanctions. But a year after becoming the leader of the EU’s third-largest economy, Meloni has defied expectations — and built a significant (if cautious) fan club.

Meloni has moved to implement constitutional reforms that would significantly boost prime ministerial powers. And she still throws plenty of red meat to her far-right base.

1. Elvira Nabiullina

Putin’s banker

Elvira Nabiullina is the top technocrat keeping Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war machine humming. During the decade she’s sat at the helm of Russia’s central bank, Nabiullina’s hawkish monetary policies have repeatedly saved the ruble and kept the country’s economy afloat. In the process, Putin’s banker, once considered a moderating influence and now his silent enabler, has managed to stave off the effects of unprecedented Western sanctions designed to drain the Kremlin’s coffers, prolonging the war on Ukraine.

Nabiullina’s rise was an unlikely one — she is the daughter of blue-collar ethnic Tatars from Ufa, a city in Russia’s Republic of Bashkortostan, more than 1,000 kilometers from Moscow. But from humble beginnings, she became the first woman to run a central bank of a G8 country.

1. Volodymyr Zelenskyy

The marathon runner

Winston Churchill. Martin Luther King Jr. Nelson Mandela. Every once in a while, a leader comes along and single-handedly changes the course of history, not through the might of their army or the strength of their economy, but through the power of their words. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is such a leader. 

From his defiant “We are here” video filmed in the first days of the war outside his presidential office on Bankova Street and his iconic “I need ammunition, not a ride” quip delivered in response to a U.S. offer to evacuate, to the tailor-made screeds he has given in parliaments around Europe and the world, Zelenskyy inspired Ukrainians to continue resisting Russia’s attempted full-scale invasion, and cajoled, shamed and begged nations into helping them do so.