Paul Biya, Cameroon’s president, is 93 years old. He leads a country where the median age is just 18. A staggering 75-year age gap.

Biya is the most extreme example, but he reflects a pattern we see almost everywhere in the world. Leaders are often a lot older than the populations they govern. Three in four people globally live in a country led by someone over 65. Two in three have a leader older than 70. Most of the world lives under a leader who is past the age when most people retire.

In this article, I’ll present some of the key charts and statistics. But you can also explore this data on your own in this interactive visualisation.

Let’s start with the 19 countries in the G20; it brings together a mix of countries from different regions. Two leaders are over 80: Brazil’s Lula da Silva (who might not be in office for much longer), and Donald Trump. Another seven are in the over-70s camp. Only three — Italy’s Meloni, France’s Macron, and Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman — are younger than 50 (if you take King Salman to be Saudi’s executive leader instead, it’s just two).