12 heroes who will make 2017 great again (in a good way)

Since its European launch in April 2015, POLITICO has run a provocative series called “Dirty Dozen,” designed to call out 12 characters — individuals, groups or institutions — that spell gloom (or worse) in a particular sphere. Earlier this year, we identified a dozen who’d be likely to ruin 2017. Here, for a change, we offer you a list that focuses on the lovelier opposite: 12 people who will give you a much-needed lift of the heart in the coming months.

As Donald Trump tears up the presidential rulebook; as Vladimir Putin continues to harass Ukraine and wage a war of disinformation against the West; as China barges into the global space vacated by America; and as Islamic terrorism continues its wretched march, we offer you 12 reasons to believe the world isn’t such a miserable place after all. Here, in alphabetical order, is our Delightful Dozen:

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Adama Barrow

Barrow is the man who unseated Yahyah Jammeh, one of Africa’s nastier autocrats, as president of Gambia. It was an improbable victory for elected government in a part of the world where democracy has always struggled to assert itself. Jammeh had ruled his country in an iron-fisted and frequently unhinged way, decreeing a four-day week and claiming to have found a cure for AIDS. He professed that his presidency would last “a billion years,” if Allah willed it: Allah was merciful, and kept him to 22. One of Barrow’s first acts on assuming office late last month was to restore his country’s original name, the Republic of the Gambia. (“Gambia’s official name will no longer be the Islamic Republic,” he tweeted.) An Arsenal fan, he once worked as a security guard in a north London department store during his time in exile. “We want Gambia to be very active again in this world,” he told the New York Times.

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Le Canard enchaîné

Without a doubt the best-named newspaper in the world, the “Chained Duck” is France’s most irreverent watchdog. Founded in 1915, it’s still as pesky to the powerful as it was a century ago, tormenting a long line of presidents and politicians, most recently François Fillon, the conservative candidate in the upcoming presidential elections. Le Canard may have derailed Fillon after alleging — irrefutably — that the man had employed his own wife as his parliamentary aide at an immodest salary, for which, it seems, the lady did almost no work. The satirical paper is a disinfectant in French politics, breaking stories that the generally servile mainstream press does not want to touch. If you suspect the French elite is comprised of philandering, bribe-taking, faux-intellectual Napoleons-manqués, then Le Canard exists to tell you you’re absolutely right. Less obviously ideological than Mediapart — an online rival that is solidly on the left — Le Canard is contrarian, inclined to take a kick at whoever is in power. It hounded Valéry Giscard d’Estaing over gifts of diamonds from African dictators, François Mitterrand over his sinking of the Rainbow Warrior, Nicolas “Chouchou” Sarkozy over almost anything, and François Hollande over his embarrassing in-house hairdresser at the Élysée.

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Ruth Davidson

This self-described “tough old bird” is arguably the sanest, ablest politician in Britain, a land impressively lacking, at present, in politicians of whom anything kind might be said. To Davidson goes the credit for resurrecting that rarest of species — the Scottish Tory — and under her watch the Conservatives have gone from being the party Scots love to loathe to the second party (behind the Scottish Nationalists) in parliament in Edinburgh. She’s better with the press than almost any other British politician and, as a 37-year-old lesbian kick-boxer, is as unlike the usual old, male, straight Scottish Tory as it’s possible to be. Many believe the House of Commons offers a bigger and better stage for her talents, but she’s adamant that her place is in Scotland, fighting to keep the Tories in political contention — and Scotland in the United Kingdom, even after Brexit.

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Roger Federer

At a time when an escape from politics becomes ever harder, we’re grateful for marvels like Federer, who can transport us to spheres of achievement where there’s no irony or snark, just ambition and athleticism. Returning to competitive tennis after a six-month injury break — he damaged his knee drawing a bath for his children — Federer won the Australian Open in magical manner. Perhaps the greatest tennis player of all time, he has the touch and variety of John McEnroe, the precision of Ken Rosewall, the mental toughness of Björn Borg, and the strength of Novak Djokovic. To come back successfully from prolonged injury in an age of hyper-competitive supermen-on-court, and to win three five-setters in four matches, was nothing short of miraculous. At 35, a prolonged renaissance is out of the question, but if he were to win another Open tournament this year — Wimbledon would be his best bet — his claim to peerlessness would be impossible to dispute.

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Felipe VI of Spain

Spain isn’t an easy country of which to be king. While it has had monarchs for most of its history, the present monarchy was activated only in 1975, after the death of Francisco Franco, who ruled unchallenged for 39 years. Felipe came to the throne in June 2014, when his father, Juan Carlos I, abdicated in the face of increasingly inconvenient controversies in the royal household. A potent strain of republicanism runs through Spain, and the country has been riven by every conceivable political problem: corruption, parliamentary instability, economic downturns, mass youth unemployment and corrosive Catalan separatism. After the November 2015 elections, Spain was without a government for almost a year, and Felipe was in the spotlight, deciding who should try to form a government. He steered the process with aplomb, and to general acclaim. It helps that he’s seen as a monarch “in touch” with his subjects — he’s college-educated (unlike any previous Spanish monarch) and married to a divorced commoner who once worked as a TV anchor. In a time of European turmoil, Felipe is Spain’s greatest political asset. (Imagine how much more sane Italy would be if it had a king like him!)

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Vicente Fox Quesada

The imposingly tall Fox, a former president of Mexico, is a feisty and indignant hombre. As President Trump beds in at the White House, tweeting incessantly about the wall he intends to build on America’s southern border — and which Mexico will pay for, he says — Fox has taken to Twitter himself, shooting riposte after riposte at Trump. It all began when Trump locked horns with Mexico’s President Enrique Peña Nieto within hours of assuming office, raising the subject of the wall on the eve of Peña Nieto’s visit to Washington. The visit was canceled, and Fox — a rougher, tougher type than the dapper, emollient Peña Nieto — led what became a Mexican national uprising on Twitter against Trump. In so doing, he has acquired a cult following for himself north of the Rio Grande, with many Americans hostile to Trump seeing him as an inspirationally pugnacious figure who can give Trump a taste of his own social media.

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Vladimir Kara-Murza

It says much for the effectiveness of Kara-Murza as a leader of the Russian political opposition to Putin that the dark operatives at the latter’s disposal have allegedly poisoned him not once, but twice, in two ruthless murder attempts in the space of two years. An irrepressible critic of the Russian president, Kara-Murza suffers once more from “acute intoxication of unidentified origin” — the Orwellian diagnosis of the Moscow hospital where he was admitted for cascading organ failures after the first poisoning, in May 2015. The chairman of the Boris Nemtsov Foundation, named after the Russian opposition leader murdered in 2015, Kara-Murza was poisoned a second time on February 2, shortly after submitting a request to hold a rally to commemorate Nemtsov. A vocal advocate for Western sanctions against top Russian officials, his courage in the face of Putin is an inspiration — and also a rebuke to Trump.

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James Mattis

As the world struggles to compose itself in the face of President Trump, a great deal of nervous faith is being placed — particularly in the capital cities of Europe — in Mattis’ ability to keep American security policy on its long-established course. The general is now the U.S. secretary of defense, and is as widely lauded for his intellectual gifts as he is for his indomitability as a soldier. As with all rational defense strategists, he sees NATO as a cornerstone of American national security, which puts him potentially in collision with Trump, who has never missed an opportunity to bad-mouth the defense treaty that has kept the West safe for more than six decades. Mattis’ presence in the Trump cabinet is nerve-settling proof that there will always be at least one adult in the presidential war room.

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Angela Merkel

With Trump at the helm in the United States; Putin on top in Russia; Xi Jinping lording it over China; a feckless Theresa May prime minister in post-Brexit Britain; France facing an election whose results could yet horrify us; edgy nationalists in Japan and India; and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan unraveling all that’s good in Turkey, it’s a matter of delicious comfort to have Angela Merkel running Germany. The world at large, and Europe most specifically, should begin every waking day with a vote of thanks to Frau Merkel: for being a pillar of civilized cosmopolitanism, compassionate conservatism, trade-oriented economics and opposition to Russian expansionism. They say former European Parliament President Martin Schulz could give Merkel a run for her money at the next election, perhaps even unseating her as chancellor. But it’s hard to see the pragmatic Germans ditch the finest chancellor the country has had since the war … for Schulz. He is a fine politician, no doubt, but he will likely have to wait for Merkel to move on.

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Elif Shafak

A ray of sunshine in an increasingly benighted land, Shafak is, after Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s greatest contemporary writer. Born in Strasbourg into a dysfunctional diplomatic family, she was raised mostly by her mother. She writes in Turkish and English — on history and Istanbul, and, without being didactic, on patriarchy and feminism. She is seen by many Turks as a foreigner, a member of the global elite, and her writing is entirely at odds with the Islamist ethos of Erdoğan’s Turkey. She has been on trial for insulting “Turkishness” in her novel “The Bastard of Istanbul,” and became a nationalist hate-figure for her defense of Armenian and Kurdish rights. Referring to the law under which she was prosecuted, Shafak says, “no one knows what it means. The trial took over a year. There were groups on the streets burning EU flags and spitting at my pictures. I was acquitted but it was a turbulent time … What made it still more surreal was that, for the first time in Turkey, a work of fiction was tried.” Shafak lives in London, and “carries Istanbul in [her] soul.”

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The United States judiciary

The real stars of the first two weeks of the Trump presidency have been judges, without a shred of doubt. The American president arrived at the White House armed with aggressive intent and an inner circle that pressed him to act on it. One of his earliest expressions of presidential muscle was an executive order that sought to ban travel into the United States from seven Muslim-majority countries, all in the Middle East. If an American presidential decree could ever be called intemperate, this was it, as the order blocked entry not only to visa-holders from these countries, but also to some of their citizens who held American green cards — in other words, lawful, permanent residents of the U.S. This last prohibition on entry was so clearly illegitimate — and possibly also unconstitutional — that judges in various jurisdictions scrambled to issue “stay” orders, largely suspending Trump’s ban. It was a humiliating defeat for a vainglorious man, and he reacted by attacking one of his tormentors as a “so-called judge.” One suspects that this will not be the last confrontation between Trump and the judiciary, whom many now see as guarantors of sanity in an America that doesn’t quite know what’s hit it.

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Margrethe Vestager

In 2015 and 2016, Vestager, European commissioner for competition, was the best news story Team Juncker had. Taking on Gazprom, telling Apple to pay more taxes, warning Google to keep its tentacles in check, fining truckmakers for ripping off consumers — these were areas where the seemingly remote Commission could connect with the European electorate. And in Vestager, they had a consummate communicator who could make abstruse questions accessible, even populist. How might this continue in 2017? Tax cases against McDonald’s, Amazon and the French electric utility company Engie could finally force multinationals across Europe to rethink their complex tax arrangements and start paying “fair dues” into the public purse. Vestager is expected to finalize several probes against Google, too, this year, the first major regulatory setback for the giant search engine. Qualcomm, MasterCard and the Hollywood movie studios are also likely to feel her crusading heat, and she is expected to veto or impose tough conditions on deals between Europe’s largest stock exchanges and the world’s largest agrichemical companies. For those who believe multinationals are in need of the firm smack of oversight, Vestager is likely to remain a hero.

Tunku Varadarajan, a contributing editor at POLITICO, is the Virginia Hobbs Carpenter Research Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.