As if Barack Obama wasn’t having a bad enough week, Forbes has dropped him to No. 2 on its annual “Most Powerful People” list, citing his electoral defeat as a major reason. “It's quite a come-down for last year's most powerful person, who after enacting widespread reforms in his first two years in office will be hard-pressed to implement his agenda in the next two,” Forbes writes. Taking his place? Chinese President Hu Jintao.
“Hu doesn’t have to contend with those annoying artifacts of democracy like Congress, an independent judiciary, an uncensored media and voting by common citizens,” Forbes’ Beijing bureau chief argues in a separate blog post, though he admits that figuring out who has the most power in China’s Politburo is “a game of educated guesses.” Here’s how the rest of the top 20 shook out:
- Hu Jintao
- Barack Obama
- King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al Saud
- Vladimir Putin
- Pope Benedict
- Angela Merkel
- David Cameron
- Ben Bernanke
- Sonia Gandhi
- Bill Gates
- Zhou Xiaochuan
- Dmitry Medvedev
- Rupert Murdoch
- Silvio Berlusconi
- Jean-Claude Trichet
- Dilma Rousseff
- Steve Jobs
- Manmohan Singh
- Nicolas Sarkozy
- Hillary Clinton
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