This world leaders trivia quiz has 50 free questions with answers and ranges across a century of presidents, prime ministers, monarchs and dictators. There are firsts (the first woman elected prime minister, the first elected female head of state in Africa), records (the longest-reigning monarch, the longest UN speech), and the odd back-stories that make leaders memorable: the electrician who toppled communism in Poland, the playwright who became president, the bus driver who ran Venezuela, the comedian who became a wartime president and the physicist who ran Germany for sixteen years. It covers every continent, from Lee Kuan Yew and Sukarno to Mandela, Nkrumah and Sirleaf, from Adenauer, de Gaulle and Thatcher to Lula, Mujica and Milei. Difficulty runs from easy questions on Churchill and Obama to hard ones on Cameroon and Kazakhstan. Every answer is checked against Wikipedia and cited on the question, so you can see where each fact comes from.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Angela Merkel earned a doctorate in which scientific field before entering politics?
Quantum chemistry
She was the first woman and the first former East German to serve as chancellor, from 2005 to 2021.
Q 02How many years did Nelson Mandela spend in prison?
27
His Xhosa forename Rolihlahla colloquially means 'troublemaker'.
Q 03A journalist from which country gave Margaret Thatcher the nickname 'the Iron Lady'?
The Soviet Union
She read chemistry at Oxford and worked as a research chemist before becoming a barrister.
Q 04Winston Churchill won a Nobel Prize in 1953 in which category?
Literature
A 2002 BBC poll of nearly 450,000 people voted him the greatest Briton ever.
Q 05Roughly how long was Fidel Castro's record-setting speech at the UN General Assembly?
Four and a half hours
He was the longest-serving non-royal head of state of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Q 06In which East German city did Vladimir Putin serve as a KGB officer under cover as a translator?
Dresden
He became acting president when Boris Yeltsin resigned on the last day of 1999.
Q 07In 2018 Xi Jinping changed China's constitution to remove what?
Presidential term limits
As a teenager during the Cultural Revolution he was sent to the village of Liangjiahe in Shaanxi.
Q 08Jacinda Ardern was only the second elected head of government to give birth in office. Who was the first?
Benazir Bhutto
At 37 she was then the world's youngest female head of government.
Q 09Before entering politics, Volodymyr Zelenskyy played a fictional Ukrainian president in which TV series?
Servant of the People
He also won the first season of Ukraine's Dancing with the Stars in 2006.
Q 10What share of the vote did Zelenskyy win in the 2019 run-off, Ukraine's biggest presidential landslide?
73 percent
His new party then won a snap parliamentary election in a landslide too.
Q 11Emmanuel Macron became France's youngest ever president at what age?
39
He had worked as an investment banker at Rothschild & Co and founded En Marche in 2016.
Q 12Who became the world's first woman elected prime minister, in 1960?
Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Sri Lanka
She served three separate terms, the last ending in 2000.
Q 13Which country elected Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, the first elected female president, in 1980?
Iceland
Her sixteen years make her the longest-serving elected female head of state in history.
Q 21Václav Havel, last president of Czechoslovakia and first of the Czech Republic, first rose to prominence as what?
A playwright
He led the country from the Velvet Revolution in 1989 to 2003.
Q 22Lech Wałęsa, who led Poland's Solidarity movement and became president in 1990, worked in what trade?
Electrician
He was Poland's first president elected by popular vote.
Q 23Which two Russian words for 'openness' and 'restructuring' defined Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms?
Glasnost and perestroika
He was the last leader of the Soviet Union, from 1985 to its dissolution in 1991.
Q 14Golda Meir grew up and trained as a teacher in which US city?
Milwaukee
Born in Kyiv, she became Israel's prime minister in 1969 after Levi Eshkol died.
Q 15Benazir Bhutto was the first woman to lead a democratic government in what kind of nation?
A Muslim-majority one
She was assassinated in December 2007 while campaigning.
Q 16Lee Kuan Yew served as Singapore's first prime minister for how many years?
31
He read law at Cambridge and was called to the bar at the Middle Temple in 1950.
Q 17Paul Biya became president of which African country in 1982?
Cameroon
By 2025 he was the longest consecutively serving non-royal national leader in the world.
Q 18Which leader took power in Equatorial Guinea in a 1979 coup against his own uncle?
Teodoro Obiang
By 2025 he was the longest-ruling president in Africa, just ahead of Cameroon's Paul Biya.
Q 19Franklin D. Roosevelt is the only US president to have done what?
Served more than two terms
An illness in 1921 permanently paralysed his legs.
Q 20Sanna Marin became Finland's youngest ever prime minister in 2019 at what age?
34
Twelve of the nineteen ministers in her five-party cabinet were women when it was formed.
Q 24Shinzo Abe was the longest-serving prime minister in the history of which country?
Japan
His economic programme was nicknamed 'Abenomics'; he was assassinated in 2022.
Q 25José Mujica, 'the world's poorest president', gave away roughly what share of his salary?
90 percent
A former Tupamaros guerrilla, he had spent 14 years in prison under the dictatorship.
Q 26Before becoming a union leader and then president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro worked as what?
A bus driver
He was Hugo Chávez's vice-president and foreign minister before succeeding him in 2013.
Q 27In 2021 El Salvador's Nayib Bukele made what legal tender alongside the US dollar?
Bitcoin
His gang crackdown from 2022 led to more than 85,000 arrests by the end of 2024.
Q 28Justin Trudeau was born in Ottawa while his father held what office?
Prime minister of Canada
He led the Liberals from 2013 and was prime minister from 2015 to 2025.
Q 29How many months into his presidency was Barack Obama awarded the Nobel Peace Prize?
Nine
He was the fourth US president to win it and the third to do so while in office.
Q 30Elizabeth II reigned for how long, the longest of any British monarch?
70 years
She was 25 when her father died in February 1952.