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Benito Juárez
Born
Mexico's Reform Laws of the 1850s and 1860s, which Juárez championed and enforced as president, separated church and state, created civil marriage and civil registries of births and deaths, and put Church property up for sale. The secular state they built still frames Mexican public life. The contested part is the land policy: the same laws that broke up Church estates also undermined communally held Indigenous land, which ended up concentrated in fewer hands and fed the grievances behind the 1910 revolution.
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Abraham Lincoln
Born
The war overshadows it, but 1862 alone gave the United States the Homestead Act, the Morrill Act that funded land-grant universities, the Pacific Railway Act and a new Department of Agriculture, and Lincoln then pushed the Thirteenth Amendment through Congress to abolish slavery. Land-grant institutions such as Cornell and the University of Illinois still educate millions. The cost is part of the record: much of the land given away for homesteads, colleges and railways was taken from Native nations.
More about Abraham Lincoln3
José Batlle y Ordóñez
Born
Twice president of Uruguay in the early 1900s, Batlle built one of the first welfare states in the Americas: an eight-hour working day, free secondary education, legal divorce on the wife's request alone, abolition of the death penalty and state companies in banking, insurance and electricity. Uruguay's reputation as a secular, socially liberal country with strong public provision traces straight back to him. Critics then and since argue the state enterprises grew inefficient and the model became hard to pay for once export prices fell.
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Theodore Roosevelt
Born
Roosevelt's lasting domestic mark is public land. He placed around 230 million acres under federal protection, created the Forest Service and used the 1906 Antiquities Act to declare national monuments, a power presidents of both parties still use. The same year brought the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act, the roots of today's Food and Drug Administration. His trust-busting reputation is larger than its results, and the reserves sometimes meant removing people who already lived and hunted there.
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Woodrow Wilson
Born
Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act, the first permanent federal income tax after the Sixteenth Amendment, the Clayton Antitrust Act and the law creating the Federal Trade Commission, all within his first two years. The central bank and the income tax remain the core of American economic government. His record is impossible to separate from his decision to allow segregation across federal departments, which pushed Black civil servants out of jobs they had held for decades.
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Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
Few presidents changed daily life so completely. Under Atatürk, Turkey adopted a Latin alphabet, a civil code modelled on Switzerland's that ended polygamy and gave women equal rights in divorce and inheritance, women's suffrage in 1934, surnames and a secular state with religious courts abolished. The alphabet and civil code are still in force nearly a century later. The reforms came from a one-party state that suppressed dissent, and the treatment of Kurdish risings, especially Dersim in 1937 and 1938, remains bitterly disputed.
More about Mustafa Kemal Atatürk7
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Born
The benchmark for this list. The Social Security Act of 1935 still pays pensions to most older Americans, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation still guarantees bank deposits, the Securities and Exchange Commission still polices markets and the Fair Labor Standards Act created the federal minimum wage. Economists still argue over how much the New Deal itself ended the Depression rather than wartime spending, and many programmes excluded farm and domestic workers, a choice that left out a large share of Black workers in the South.
More about Franklin D. Roosevelt8
Lázaro Cárdenas
Born
Cárdenas distributed around 18 million hectares of land to peasant communities through the ejido system and nationalised the oil industry in 1938, creating Pemex. The expropriation is still marked every 18 March, and Pemex remains a state company. The results are mixed: many ejidos stayed too small and underfunded to prosper, and the party structure he consolidated went on to govern Mexico without interruption until 2000.
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Getúlio Vargas
Born
The Consolidation of Labour Laws that Vargas decreed in 1943 still governs Brazilian employment, from the minimum wage and paid holidays to the signed work card that marks formal jobs. He also founded the steel company at Volta Redonda and, in his elected second term, Petrobras. The awkward fact is how much of this came from the Estado Novo dictatorship of 1937 to 1945, with censorship, political prisoners and unions placed under state control.
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Dwight D. Eisenhower
Born
The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 committed the United States to the Interstate Highway System, now about 48,000 miles long and still carrying a quarter of the country's vehicle travel. Eisenhower also kept the New Deal settlement in place rather than dismantling it, extending Social Security to millions more workers. The motorways reshaped American cities, often by routing traffic through Black and poorer neighbourhoods, a consequence planners and historians still argue about.
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Charles de Gaulle
Born
De Gaulle's lasting domestic achievement is the constitution of the Fifth Republic, adopted in 1958 and strengthened in 1962 with direct election of the president. After the chronic instability of the Fourth Republic, it has given France stable government for nearly seventy years. Whether it concentrates too much power in the Élysée is a live argument in French politics, sharpened whenever parliament is split, and calls for a Sixth Republic come from both left and right.
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Habib Bourguiba
Born
Tunisia's Code of Personal Status, enacted in 1956 under Bourguiba's leadership, abolished polygamy, required consent to marriage and replaced repudiation with divorce through the courts. It made Tunisian women's legal rights among the strongest in the Arab world, and it survived both the 2011 revolution and the Islamist-led governments that followed. Bourguiba also expanded free schooling. He ruled as president for life until he was removed in 1987, and his rule tolerated no organised opposition.
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Julius Nyerere
Born
A useful case for separating success from failure within one presidency. Nyerere's push for Swahili as the national language and universal primary schooling helped make Tanzania one of the least ethnically divided states in Africa, and that national identity has lasted. His Ujamaa programme of collective villages, which moved millions of people, often under pressure, wrecked farm output and was quietly abandoned. He admitted the economic failures himself before stepping down voluntarily in 1985.
More about Julius Nyerere14
Lyndon B. Johnson
Born
Johnson signed more lasting domestic law than almost any president: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Medicare and Medicaid, federal school funding through the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, Head Start and the 1965 immigration act that ended national-origin quotas. Medicare and Medicaid now cover well over a hundred million Americans. Key sections of the Voting Rights Act were weakened by the Supreme Court in 2013, and the war in Vietnam drained both money and trust from his programmes.
More about Lyndon B. Johnson15
Richard Nixon
Born
The domestic Nixon is easy to forget behind Watergate. His administration created the Environmental Protection Agency, signed the Clean Air Act of 1970, the Endangered Species Act and the law establishing the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and introduced Supplemental Security Income for poor older and disabled people. All of it is still running. Historians debate how much was conviction and how much was a response to a Democratic Congress and public pressure, and he also began the federal war on drugs.
More about Richard Nixon16
François Mitterrand
Born
Mitterrand's first years produced the abolition of the death penalty in 1981, the decentralisation laws that gave France's regions elected councils and real budgets, and the fifth week of paid holiday. All three have lasted. His nationalisations of banks and industry did not, and by 1983 his government had reversed course into austerity to stay in the European exchange-rate system, a turn that still shapes arguments on the French left.
More about François Mitterrand17
Nelson Mandela
Born
The 1996 constitution, negotiated during Mandela's presidency, is his most durable domestic legacy: a Bill of Rights including rights to housing, health care and water, an independent Constitutional Court and bodies such as the Public Protector. South African courts still use it to hold governments to account. The economic record is more argued over. Land reform moved slowly, inequality stayed among the highest in the world, and his government's approach to HIV was cautious, though nothing like his successor's denial.
More about Nelson Mandela18
Fernando Henrique Cardoso
Born
As finance minister Cardoso launched the Real Plan that ended Brazilian hyperinflation in 1994, and as president he made it stick, with the Fiscal Responsibility Law of 2000 limiting what governments at every level could spend and borrow. The real is still Brazil's currency and the fiscal rules still bind. The privatisations of his years, including Vale and the telephone system, remain divisive, and the constitutional change that let him run for a second term came amid allegations of bought votes.
More about Fernando Henrique Cardoso19
Kim Dae-jung
Born
Taking office in the middle of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, Kim Dae-jung merged South Korea's many health insurance societies into a single national insurer, completed in 2000, and created the National Basic Livelihood Security system that guarantees a minimum income. Both are still the backbone of Korean welfare. He also forced restructuring on the chaebol conglomerates. Critics point to the mass layoffs of the IMF years and the later revelation that money was secretly sent to North Korea before his 2000 summit.
More about Kim Dae-jung20
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva
Born
Bolsa Família, the cash transfer Lula's first government launched in 2003, pays families on condition that children attend school and get vaccinations. It reached around a quarter of Brazilians and became a model studied worldwide. The test of outlasting came under his successor, who renamed it Auxílio Brasil before Lula restored the original name in 2023; he won a fourth term in October 2026. The corruption scandals around his governments, and his own conviction that was later annulled, remain intensely disputed.
More about Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva21
Michelle Bachelet
Born
Bachelet's 2008 pension reform added a state-funded solidarity pension to Chile's private account system, giving the poorest older people a guaranteed income, and her second term brought free university tuition for lower-income students, an end to the binomial electoral system and legal abortion in three narrow circumstances. Most of it has survived changes of government. Her attempt to replace the Pinochet-era constitution stalled, and the later replacement processes were both rejected by voters.
More about Michelle Bachelet22
Barack Obama
Born
The Affordable Care Act of 2010 survived repeal attempts and three Supreme Court cases. Its protections for people with pre-existing conditions, young adults on parents' plans and the Medicaid expansion adopted by most states are now part of the furniture of American health care. What has not lasted is just as telling: the individual mandate penalty was cut to zero in 2017, and the enhanced marketplace subsidies added later expired at the end of 2025, with enrolment falling in 2026. Dodd-Frank financial regulation was partly rolled back too.
More about Barack Obama
