The 20 Most Incompetent Leaders in History

The third emperor of Rome began his reign with enough popularity to last a lifetime, but he squandered it at a truly alarming rate. Just a few years after coming to power, he had reportedly already executed people on a whim, drained the imperial treasury to fund lavish personal projects, and humiliated members of the Senate for his own amusement. His reign lasted only four years before his own Praetorian Guard, having had enough, assassinated him in A.D. 41.

Nero inherited one of the most powerful empires of the ancient world and began to rule it with breathtaking excess. He had his own mother murdered, had his first wife executed, and was far more interested in his artistic pursuits than in the day-to-day responsibilities of governing an empire. When a rebellion finally forced him to flee Rome in 68 A.D., even his closest allies had abandoned him, and he committed suicide at the age of 30.

Commodus succeeded his father, Marcus Aurelius, one of Rome’s most respected philosopher-emperors, and soon began steering the empire in the opposite direction. He developed an obsession with gladiatorial combat, frequently entering the arena himself and forcing senators to watch him fight while dressed as Hercules. His erratic behavior and lack of interest in governing eventually led to a conspiracy among members of his own household, who had him strangled in his bath in 192 AD.

The nickname “Unready” is actually a mistranslation of the Old English word “unræd,” which means “ill-advised” or “unwise,” but in any case, it is a description that fits King Ethelred of England rather well. He spent much of his reign paying enormous sums of money—known as Danegeld—to the Viking invaders in exchange for a temporary peace, rather than establishing an effective military defense. He was eventually driven from his throne by the Danish King Sweyn Forkbeard, fled into exile in Normandy, and was not restored to power until after Sweyn’s sudden death in 1014.

King John inherited a vast Angevin empire from his brother Richard I and managed to cede most of it to France within a few years, earning him the unflattering nickname “Softsword.” His oppressive tax policies and disregard for feudal rights prompted his own barons to rebel, forcing him to sign the Magna Carta in 1215—a document that significantly limited royal power and became one of the cornerstones of constitutional government. He died in 1216 during another baronial uprising, having never truly managed to regain the trust or loyalty of the nobility he had spent years alienating.

Nicknamed “El Hechizado,” or “The Bewitched One,” Charles II was the product of several generations of inbreeding within the House of Habsburg, which left him with severe physical and mental disabilities. He could not walk until he was between four and eight years old, had difficulty chewing his food due to a severely protruding jaw, and was described by his contemporaries as barely capable of taking care of himself, let alone ruling an empire. When he died without an heir in 1700, the ensuing conflict over the succession sparked the War of the Spanish Succession, a conflict that completely redrew the map of Europe.

Christian VII ascended to the throne of Denmark while still a teenager and showed signs of severe mental illness almost immediately after taking power. He was prone to unpredictable outbursts of anger, apparent hallucinations, and erratic public behavior that scandalized European courts and raised serious concerns about his fitness to rule. Real power eventually passed into the hands of his court physician, Johann Friedrich Struensee, who implemented radical reforms before being arrested and executed in 1772, leaving the Danish government in a state of persistent instability.

Louis XVI was a man of considerable personal integrity, but personal integrity does not automatically translate into political competence, and his reign clearly demonstrated this. He was known for his indecisiveness, often changing course at critical moments, and his handling of the severe financial crisis France was facing proved disastrously inadequate; his attempts at reform were repeatedly blocked by a privileged nobility that he was unwilling to confront directly. When the French Revolution broke out in 1789, his persistent vacillation between conciliation and resistance only exacerbated an already dire situation, and he was ultimately executed by guillotine in January 1793.

Nicholas II was the last tsar of Russia, and his reign strikingly illustrates what happens when an autocratic leader refuses to adapt to the political realities unfolding around him. He dismissed early opportunities for constitutional reform, allowed the disastrous Rasputin to gain influence at court through his wife Alexandra, and led Russia into a catastrophic involvement in World War I that the country’s infrastructure simply could not sustain. The February Revolution of 1917 forced him to abdicate, and he was executed along with his entire family by the Bolsheviks in July 1918.

Wilhelm II of Germany had a knack for making inflammatory remarks at the worst possible moments, and his impulsive foreign policy decisions helped drag Europe into World War I. His decision to dismiss Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in 1890—one of the most skilled diplomats in European history—made German foreign policy significantly less stable and more prone to the kind of provocations that alarmed neighboring nations. By the end of the war in 1918, Germany was defeated and humiliated, and Wilhelm was forced to abdicate and flee to the Netherlands, where he spent the rest of his days in comfortable exile.

Today, Neville Chamberlain is remembered primarily for a catastrophic error in judgment: his policy of appeasement toward Adolf Hitler in the late 1930s. After signing the Munich Agreement in 1938, which ceded the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany, he returned to Great Britain and declared that the agreement had secured “peace for our time.” Less than a year later, Hitler had invaded Poland, World War II had broken out, and Chamberlain’s policy had proved to be a bitter failure, both in terms of judgment and foresight.

King Farouk ascended to the throne of Egypt with genuine promise and considerable initial popularity, but his reign gradually collapsed under the weight of his own excesses and political incompetence. He developed a reputation as an extravagant spender while his country was plagued by deep poverty; his palatial collections reportedly included everything from rare stamps to stolen valuables, and his weight increased considerably over the years. Egypt’s humiliating defeat in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War—largely attributed in part to poor military planning under his government—ultimately led to a military coup in 1952 that forced him into permanent exile.

Bokassa seized power in the Central African Republic in a military coup in 1966 and subsequently ruled the country with increasing brutality and delusion. In 1977, he reportedly spent one-third of the country’s total annual budget on a lavish self-coronation ceremony during which he proclaimed himself Emperor Bokassa I, an event that the French government partially financed before subsequently expressing deep regret over its involvement. His regime came to an end after the 1979 massacre of schoolchildren, in which he personally participated—an atrocity that ultimately prompted France to intervene and remove him from power.

Idi Amin seized power in Uganda following a military coup in 1971 and ruled the country through a combination of extreme violence and unpredictable decisions that left the nation devastated. He expelled the entire Asian community from Uganda in 1972, which destroyed much of the country’s commercial and professional infrastructure overnight, and his regime killed dozens of people during his eight years in power. His disastrous decision to invade Tanzania in 1978 ultimately backfired when Tanzanian forces, supported by Ugandan exiles, invaded the country and ousted him from power in 1979.

Lon Nol came to power in Cambodia after a U.S.-backed coup overthrew Prince Norodom Sihanouk in 1970; his tenure was marked by military incompetence and an administration riddled with corruption. His army was generally described as poorly trained, underfunded, and riddled with “ghost soldiers”—soldiers who existed only on paper so that their commanders could pocket their salaries. The Khmer Rouge, taking advantage of the chaos and resentment caused by his government, gradually gained ground and finally captured Phnom Penh in April 1975, bringing his reign to an end and marking the beginning of one of the worst genocides of the 20th century.

Robert Mugabe led Zimbabwe to independence, freeing it from the yoke of the white minority, and was once hailed on the international stage as a hero of liberation, but the final decades of his rule revealed a very different reality. The accelerated land reform program implemented by his government in the early 2000s, which led to the forced confiscation of white-owned farms without proper planning or compensation, caused the collapse of Zimbabwe’s agricultural sector and triggered a hyperinflation crisis that reached an estimated rate of 89.7 sextillion percent at its peak in 2008. He clung to power for years through electoral manipulation and intimidation, and it ultimately took a military intervention in 2017 to remove him from office at the age of 93.

Anastasio Somoza Debayle was the last member of the Somoza dynasty to rule Nicaragua, and he managed to squander, in a remarkably short time, nearly all of the goodwill that his family’s regime still enjoyed. After the devastating earthquake in Managua in 1972, international aid poured into the country, and his government’s decision to divert a large portion of those funds for personal and political purposes rather than for relief efforts turned even his longtime supporters against him. The Sandinista revolution that overthrew him in 1979 enjoyed the support of a broad coalition of Nicaraguans who had grown weary of his corruption, and he fled before being assassinated in Paraguay the following year.

Justin II inherited a Byzantine Empire from his uncle Justinian I that appeared to be in good health, but he managed to destabilize it considerably in the space of just a few years. His decision to stop paying tribute to the Avars and his disastrous handling of relations with Persia triggered wars on several fronts simultaneously, pushing the empire’s military resources to their limits. By 574, the weight of his failures had apparently driven him to a complete breakdown; it is reported that he had to be wheeled around the palace in a cart, biting his servants and uttering animal-like cries, which led his co-regent Tiberius to effectively take the reins of power.

Ferdinand I of Austria was so ill-suited to governing that even his own advisors described him as incapable of leading; yet he remained on the throne for more than a decade, largely thanks to the efforts of the skilled statesmen who surrounded him. He suffered from epileptic seizures and severe cognitive impairments, and one of the most famous quotes attributed to him is “I am the emperor, and I want dumplings,” which aptly illustrates the rather limited scope of his imperial ambitions. The revolutions of 1848 ultimately destroyed what remained of his government’s ability to rule the empire, and he abdicated in December of that year in favor of his nephew, Franz Joseph I.

Francisco Solano López led Paraguay into the War of the Triple Alliance against Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay—a conflict so catastrophically mismanaged that it ranks among the most devastating cases of national self-destruction in history. He refused to accept any negotiated peace even as his country’s situation grew increasingly desperate, ordering the execution of thousands of his own officers, family members, and even foreign diplomats suspected of treason as the war turned against him. By the time he was killed in battle in 1870, Paraguay’s population had declined by approximately 60 to 90 percent, as men of fighting age had been almost entirely decimated.