[Feint1]

> There's also the argument that Western-style term limits prevent long-term strategic planning.

It seems to me that term limits are mostly the reserve of countries that have a genuine fear of authoritarian takeovers from recent experience, e.g. the nonaligned countries in South America and Africa.

Countries with executive power vested in a member of Parliament don’t have such limits, hence how you get people like Merkel, Thatcher and Mark Rutte serving as Prime Minister for so long. You also have long-term planning with the maintenance of a professional civil service rather than political appointees and the use of cabinet level decision making rather than allowing the Head of Government to unilaterally make decisions.

America and France are really the only significant “western” (politically rather than geographically) countries you can say have term limits on executive power. In both cases the introduction of term limits are post-ww2 changes. To use either example as a criticism of “the west” as a whole requires a rather narrow view of the world I think.