[Music]
[Applause]
[Music]
good morning everybody it's nice to see
so many people here
uh as we draw towards the final sessions
of this conference
um um i'm going to be moderating a
discussion my name is robin shepard
i'm the vice president of halifax
international security forum
and we'll have four fantastic uh
participants
but before we do and in a radical
departure from usual practice we're
going to actually have a fact-based
discussion
so i'd like to invite from globsec
dominica uh haidu and katka klingova who
are going to give us some
some stats and some polling evidence to
work with
thanks a lot robin good morning everyone
present here and online my name is
dominika haidu
my name is catherine aklinkova and we're
researchers from uh democracy
and resilience center at globesec in
which we focus on
um protecting democracy and democratic
processes
uh against efforts that are trying to
undermine them
and in practice this means that we study
both domestic and foreign actors the
channels to which they operate
the narratives they share and the impact
this all has on the societies
one of the means that we measure this
impact is
our public opinion polls that look
into public attitudes towards key issues
shaping the world and that's why we're
here we're actually
uh here to give you a snapshot of the
results of our research which is the
latest one it's called globsec trends
2021
you can find it online and also
everywhere here around the hotel
and this we want to set the tone for the
next session on regenerating
uh democracies worldwide and to make
this a bit more interesting we would
like to start
with a poll so if we would like to if we
could ask you to go to the app
and select this stage which is a maria
theresa stage
you should already be able to see the
first question
of the poll which is actually related to
this data from the globsec trends
yes so the first question for for for
us to you is um how do you think that
the situation
in central and eastern europe changed
over the
past year within the pandemic do you
think that the support for
democracy has to increase or the support
for authoritarian leaders has increased
yeah this is actually in the past two
years we
asked these questions you know whether
the respondents in central and eastern
europe
think that democracy based on equal
rights and
regular election is good or bad system
of governments for
uh the particular country and we also
ask them whether a strong leader who
does not have to bother
with parliament or elections is good or
bad for their country so we asked two
separate questions
um and yeah um this is what the ce
responded
yeah at the moment we have yeah exactly
uh as you can see from this chart uh it
actually is both
uh and this is one of the the
dichotomies that we observed that
uh while 84 of central and eastern
european think that democracy is a good
system
of their government at the same time 42
of central and east europeans think that
the strong autocratic leader
is as well good for their government and
actually the support
for the autocratic leader has risen by
15
in the last year and the strongest
support you can see it from the chart
for
for the strong leadership is in bulgaria
romania
and latvia do we have anybody
from in the audience you know from
romania from
bulgaria yeah well you have a lot of
things to do back home
when you get back home no but we see
this is a dangerous trend which we can
observe these days you know on one hand
people support democracy
on the other hand they also have some
sympathies towards strong leaders
so towards other perhaps other regimes
at the same time
so we can now go to the second poll yes
the second question we want to ask you
is whom do central europeans
trust the most is it the national
governments it is the
medical authorities and and scientists
is it the media or
is it armed forces what do you think
so while we wait for your answer so we
just want to highlight a few of
other highlights a few findings which
draw a picture
of satisfaction and trust in this region
um
so for example 59 of central and eastern
europeans
believe that their national governments
handled it by the pandemic badly
and at the same time 37 of central and
eastern
europeans believe that the official
number of the covet
cases is actually lower that the
authorities
are telling them so they think that the
national authorities are actually lying
and yes you are correctly assuming that
the trust in the national government
is low i think we can actually show the
audience the result now
what are the correct answers yes it's
armed forces and medical authorities and
scientists
actually when it comes to national
governments the trust is now at 42
percent
in the entire region so now actually
more people distress their governments
than they trust them and uh at the same
time yes the trust in the media
is low and it actually has uh decreased
also in the past year
but 72 percent of central and europeans
believe and trust armed forces and 68
uh trust doctors and scientific experts
so we see that these political
institutions
and and individuals are actually getting
more trust or are having more trusted
political institutions
so the question is how we cope with such
a distrust
and what do we do next what policy
measures do we need to
establish in order to make the situation
better but the answers luckily are not
upon us but it's uh
the our fantastic speakers which will
probably have some answers for us so
let's hear them out then back to you
robin
thank you thank you thank you very much
uh some of those figures are slightly
alarming and uh
uh i'm going to invite ivan krasieff and
kalinda grab akitarovic to come to the
stage and uh i i can't let the moment
pass for very long
uh although i will uh do some
introductions first uh
uh that bulgaria seemed to have a uh a a
penchant for strongman leaders and ivan
krastief
is from bulgaria he's the chairman of
the center for
liberal strategies in sofia
although he's based just an hour's drive
away from here
in vienna kalinda grab akitarovic
is the former president of uh
croatia and uh kalinda you know halifax
international security forum is based in
washington dc
and uh the word on the street in
washington dc is that you're the front
runner to be the next secretary general
of nato so uh
in terms of defending our democracies
this is a an interesting uh
an interesting development uh yen
stoltenberg steps down in september
of next year uh so we'll be watching
this space very closely
and very carefully remotely we're joined
by damon wilson who is the executive
vice president of the atlantic council
and soon to be
the president of the national endowment
for democracy in the united states a
very important position welcome
uh damon uh we're also joined it's a
particular pleasure to have somebody
from
india by neelam dio who's the director
and co-founder of gateway house
in new delhi so welcome to everybody
this is a great discussion it's the key
discussion of the moment
uh unfortunately it has been the key
discussion for many years
and what i'd like to do in this
discussion as much as anything else
is see if we can actually go beyond
spending 45 minutes simply lamenting the
state of our democracies
um having a bit of a whine about
populists um we do that all the time
let's see if we can actually
make some concrete suggestions as to how
we make the situation better and i think
even more than that
to get to a place where we don't simply
dismiss the public let alone denigrate
the public and take their concerns
seriously i think since we started out
with some
some facts of the matter uh i think it's
also um
very important for us to get a sense of
what actually is going on
in our democracies um and i'm
particularly therefore pleased to to ask
the first question to nilandayo
in new delhi india is famously the
world's
largest democracy so the question is how
democratic
is the world's largest democracy
so thank you robin i'm delighted to be
able to join
this discussion and actually we are
based in mumbai not delhi
and that's a big difference being out of
the
heat of a political center so i would
say that
india is pretty democratic we have a
leader
the prime minister has a popularity
rating of
over 70 percent despite how problematic
the second wave of
the pandemic has been for india with
high numbers of casualties
uh uh more actual breakdown of the
health uh infrastructure but i think the
point to note here
is that in india we have free and fair
elections
for the federal government as also for
the state governments
although the prime minister remains very
popular
he has just lost three state government
elections and quite resoundingly
and in no case has anybody uh
refused to accept the results
of the elections as we had in the united
states or we have
now in you know peru or israel or
whatever
people will challenge election results
in constituencies
but not the overall result
on the other hand india suffers from all
the things
that afflict democracies everywhere the
parliament does not function very well
the judiciary is often accused of being
politicized
and sometimes obviously and rightly so
the media is split between those who are
harshly critical of the government and
those who can only find
things to praise the government about
police forces
in many states are actually quite
politicized
the more important thing to my mind is
that political
mobilization is on the basis of
the fissures in our society religion
caste there is no political ideology
animating our political parties here
just as i do not see any ideology
and animating uh politics uh elsewhere
in the world
well nina this is exactly what i was
going to ask you i mean you you know
mr modi's popularity ratings you said
are somewhere above
70 why why is he so popular what is it
that indians
uh i mean given that it's 70 this must
cut a lot across a lot of the
despite the stereotypes cut across a lot
of the different
sections of a very diverse population
what is
why is he so popular what do people like
about him so much
i think a couple of factors one is
that uh political parties in india
as maybe elsewhere are now owned
they are owned either by money or
lobbying powers
or as in the case of india by families
uh the only other real main you know
all india party the congress party
belongs
to the gandhi nehru family and does not
have any very
talented politician in that family
any longer so people
have what we call the tina factor there
is no
alternative and the prime minister
continues to rate
higher in terms of who the people want
for prime minister
than he does in a lot of other elements
of polls
whether they think the economy is doing
well whether they think the pandemic was
handled well
in all of those they will the government
gets a lower
percentage of support but they get a
higher percentage of support
because uh they think there isn't an
alternative
political party to be able to lead
the whole country rather than just
some of the state governments where
regional parties actually do very well
thank you very much for that overview
it's absolutely fascinating and i think
we'll
we'll do a little bit of overviewing um
for the first five or ten minutes before
we go on to as i said
trying to get to some some concrete
suggestions as to what we do
damon wilson in washington d.c that's
indeed where you are
uh right this second um uh damon um
american democracy has been under the
spotlight it's always under the
spotlight because america is
is the is the most important democracy
in the world let's be clear about that
um it is the most influential it's the
one everybody's watching
um the the racial question the racial
divide in the united states is right at
the forefront of the discussion i live
in washington dc
you can't turn on the television news
without this being discussed
from the perspective of people like
vladimir putin of course this is a sign
of weakness
but actually the discussion in in my
opinion and i put it to you
is a sign of strength insofar as you
would agree with that
how do you assess the state of american
democracy right now
and is there is there a real prospect of
advancement in these very contentious
issues
that clearly have and continue to divide
the united states of america
thank you and yes i am joining from
washington i wish i were with all of you
in person but it's uh
such a pleasure to be back with the
globex family and this uh fantastic
uh uh panel as well robin i think you're
right what's playing out right now in
the united states
it's messy and you see a lot of debate a
lot of tension
political polarization sharp social
cleavages
and yet where we began this conversation
was with
a survey of public opinion public
attitudes
what do our people think and that is the
reality
of democracy that it's a reflection of
our people
of their fears their wants their desires
and the process of american democracy
is messy but it is a fundamentally one
that is
i think we just lost in mid-sentence
let's see if it comes back
all right we'll go back uh we'll come
back to damon he was making a very
important point there but let's uh jump
in with ivan crusty if i did say
and i can't avoid asking you this with
the opinion polling we just saw
uh this the penchant for strongman
leadership in bulgaria looks pretty
strong
is that a fair reflection of what's
going on in in bulgaria
and other parts of central and eastern
europe where romania was also a country
with a high degree of
support for the notion of a strongman
leader
robin you know there was this christian
tradition that people who committed
suicide
should be buried outside of the
graveyards
i do believe people who do not read
opinion polls should be
buried outside of the graveyards but
people who basically read too much in
the opinion polls
should be buried outside of the
graveyards too
we start with the assumptions that
people
all the time clash idea of democracy
with the idea of the strong leadership
it's not true
you go through a major crisis and people
are looking for
strong leaders but they want these
leaders to be elected by them
so from this point of view if you're
going to ask what people answering
they believe that in the moment of
crisis they have a leaders that have
certain discretionary powers
this was a poll being done during the
pandemic there is a problem with
democracy and there is a dissatisfaction
with democracy in bulgaria and this is
very much uh there and you can see this
very much happening
it does not mean that people are seeing
authoritarian leader in the lack of the
end of democracy as an alternative
so in a certain way for me the real
problem in most of our countries
is not that authoritarianism is on rise
but
the border between democracy and
authoritarianism is the least protected
border in the region
and you have a level of dissatisfaction
bulgaria goes for elections
also political cycles matters
there was a government that basically
was in power for the last 10 12 years
listen nevertheless how good you are you
are not aging well in power
this is part of the story too so from
this point of view bulgaria is ready for
change
and this is the most important in my
view in all our talks
it's not simply democracies in crisis
modern societies are changing a lot
they're changing demographically they're
changing technologically
they're changing economically and people
cannot make sense of this change
because for me what has changed most is
people ask these days to have an opinion
about things that they cannot have a
personal experience on
before 50 or 60 of the things that have
been discussed in politics
you have certain personal experience on
which you can rely
now how i can know what is happening
with the coronavirus and so on
and then of course this information
space which was totally
fragmented and which basically was
poisoned is something that is changing
people perceptions
but with all dissatisfaction it's not my
view
that central and eastern europe is
basically embracing
some type of authoritarian models ask
people do you want
elections to be banned and then you're
going to see
no they want to have the power
to dismiss the same strong leaders that
they're working for
yeah yes it's interesting isn't it we
can we can certainly find opinion poll
evidence which makes us all very
depressed but but actually at the end of
the day if you say to people
all right so you want to really abolish
elections and just have a dictator or a
monarch or something
nobody actually wants that to happen um
calinda i wanted to refer back to the
the point that i posed to damon and
damon will uh rejoin us when he links
back up
and and this is the point about american
democracy having such an important
signaling
function around the world it's
reputationally vital
that american democracy is seen to be
healthy um
from the perspective of of croatia as a
former president
what do you believe the perception of
croats
is um of uh american democracy do they
look at the kind of things i described
and think
well the whole thing is is just falling
apart so they think well look this is
how democracy works
i mean is america still seen as this
sort of shining light on a hill um or is
it seem to be tarnished
and people sort of think that well you
know american democracy isn't what it
used to be
well certainly there have been some
setbacks and uh
you know we all have to face the fact
that uh
america has been the beacon of democracy
for all of us
uh and an example and with the
developments uh uh last year it
so it did tarnish a little bit about the
american reputation
and i would say everyone else who
associates with the us
as an example and an ally because
uh it sort of uh builds upon your own
reputation who
you associate with and a lot of people
actually asked me to compare the
situation in the us to the former
yugoslavia which is completely
incomparable
because former yugoslavia was an
authoritarian
state that fell apart for many different
reasons
one of them being that people were not
able to express their freedoms
but the way that the u.s has handled the
situation has
shown that they've recognized the
problems
that uh during the trump administration
they didn't serve
they didn't become a reality but they
just
surfaced from something that was uh
ignored by the elites i would say for
years and decades
and it was just a catalyst for the
problems to come out
and to boil up on the surface
causing a number of events including uh
the public reaction
now uh we're all looking towards the u.s
how they will handle the situation
because uh the last election of course
president biden won
but when you look at the numbers you
cannot just
uh simply dismiss the 74.5 million
people
who voted trump uh actually he got more
popular vote than in the
first election that he won so you need
to engage them in a dialogue and this is
the responsibility of the so-called
political elites
trump's election in the first place was
uh in part due
to the fact that people were resisting
the political establishments and the
political elites for different reasons
that we can discuss
further but uh uh
the fact that uh we've seen rifts across
societies
it uh imposes further obligations on
politicians
on uh leadership not to look
uh at the outside environment as the
cause of the grievances
or the cause of their problems but
really to look
inside and see what is wrong that we
have been doing for decades and for
years in order to provoke not just
populist movements
but third options and alternative
movements because
not all of them uh are necessarily bad
for a certain country
and to engage and to discuss those
grievances
and try to mend the rifts across society
i think the president biden has taken a
very wise approach
of uh after he won elections
and especially during his inaugural
speech he
pointed out that america is a democracy
that has its deficiencies
it's not a perfect union but a goal is
the more perfect union that it's a
healing process
and that they are able to overcome these
divides
on this side of the atlantic of course
we have huge expectations the president
biden
and of the us and i hope he will have
the time and the resources to truly
live up to them because we want to not
just restore the transatlantic
relationship but we want to restore the
belief in democracy and democratic
systems
and we really do not uh serve
our purpose as politicians or
as people who as leaders
if we try to uh first of all resist
the fact that we need to change from the
ways that we were doing business before
because
the world has changed if we engage in a
blame shifting
game instead of uh looking at what we
have done that was
wrong and that could be remedied and
especially in blaming the public for not
understanding or misinterpreting
our own actions or our own policies uh
additionally if we paint a picture
in our our own public appearances and in
talking to the public
that are is not realistic and that does
not correspond to actual state of events
and the reality of situation
in our own countries so we do
have to admit that yes there are
shortcomings there are challenges and
we're ready and we need to
deal with these challenges additionally
you
see that a lot of people have started to
resist these
traditional establishments and elites
simply because people are tired of uh
political dynasties or dynasties
um so whichever pronunciation you prefer
and if we promise better and equal
opportunities for all we
really have to live up to that and be
inclusive rather than
exclusive and uh the fact that
again i mentioned changed the
information environment
has radically changed the way that we do
business both connective and
uh disruptive technologies not just
in science and technology and what
pandemics has emphasized work the
workplace and school
but also politics and i don't think that
the traditional political elites are
prepared for that
you know day-to-day public relations
business and
issuing communiques is not going to
help things we truly need to
listen to what uh the
so to say the other side although i'm
really
against that us and them division so
really to engage that other side address
those grievances
show that you care and work together
to try to find it to try to find a path
forward and i think this is the
the best outcome for the us as well in
all of the problems that they have post
pandemic
not just health issues but economic
issues national reconciliation
so to speak and the path forward
in how to engage those who were
dissatisfied
and were isolated uh
two different shady platforms how to
integrate them
again in mainstream politics and make it
a true functional dialogue
um calinda thanks you've provided a lot
of of of
perfectly uh and aptly provocative um
points which i will raise in the sort of
next round of question of what we do and
what have we been doing wrong i wanted
to bring back uh damon wilson her
technology intervened
against us this time it's working in our
favor generally uh today at least
um but damon we were talking about uh
the question of the restorative power of
american democracy and the
the divides in society just before uh
you could have um
perhaps just go back to where where you
were before we were interrupted and
continue on that theme of of american
health and strength
in the face of of obviously problems
that everybody's aware of
thank you robin we're working on both
our democracy and sometimes
our technology apologies but good to be
back you captured it with uh
the word restorative the power of
american democracy is that it's
self-correcting
we don't need russian propaganda or
chinese propaganda to point out the
shortcomings or fissures or failures of
american society
we're pretty good at that that's the
story of our democracy
it's our history and so yes we can't be
naive and paper over the the challenges
to
american democracy and society today
it's because we face those challenges
head on that our democracy is resilient
and it gives me a sense of optimism not
naivete
but optimism about america american
democracy
going forward we started this
conversation about being responsive to
our publics and that is the fundamentals
of a democracy
and so in united states where we had a
great recession where
wall street recovered before main street
we saw exacerbated inequalities
particular racial inequalities coming
out of a
that that unequal slow recovery a real
devastating impact on our manufacturing
base
political gridlock and and concerning
the public about our in
long-term military commitments in places
like iraq and afghanistan
it produced a public backlash that said
the elites
are failing us and we want something
different that's democracy that is a
public being responsive
and we've seen this through some
convulsions politically here
but that is the the way of a messy
process of working through these factors
and so uh if you think about it a little
bit with a historic perspective
i mean president eisenhower sent federal
troops into little rock arkansas when he
addressed the nation
explaining why he was doing this to
address
racial inequality and segregation at
home
he really cited how could the united
states play a leadership role
in the free world on the world stage if
it can't live up to those values at home
that story continues to unfold in a very
different way
but with some interesting parallels the
united states makes it through
the 68 protests the nixon impeachment
bellez
and the carter administration with the
restorative process
and so it's not easy and it's not clean
but that's what's playing out right now
in the united states which gives
me a sense of optimism that renewal
at home in the united states renewal
across democracies in the west
is fundamentally tied to the topic of
this conversation
showing that democracy can deliver for
its people and the great democracies
i think is a key ingredient to be a
catalyst for the advance of democracy
more globally damon i wonder i'm moving
into this
this question of what we actually do and
obviously we're going to do something
sensible we have to
be aware of where the problems actually
lie uh you've mentioned certain events
uh and the way that elites responded to
the events i mean we had the
uh we had the iraq war and we have the
question of weapons of mass destruction
in my opinion um pretty much every
discussion
is sort of it sort of looms as a shadow
um
over uh the american public and i think
what happened then a few years later
in 2008 with the great recession um
when uh it was seen that a lot of people
suffered but not the people who'd
actually caused the problem um
banker's bonuses famously continued for
many years very few people there were a
couple of full guys
uh but very few people actually lost
their jobs um
i'm wondering to what extent i mean
there is this restorative power of
american democracy and democracy
generally
but to what extent are the problems you
know deeper than that that are actually
structural
i mean the united states famously is
constructed
uh through a constitution in the 18th
century
it was against the backdrop of
technological and social
realities which prevailed in the 18th
century not the 21st century
is there any sense in which american
democracy is actually outdated
and in in order to really move forward
there's going to have to be a massive
new rethink of how democracy is done
look uh i think american institutions
the constitution the institutions that
flow from it the checks and balances has
been one of the great
uh power one of the great under
infrastructures that has led to
america's success in america's power
i think part of what we've been
grappling with is how that system has
been
driven by money and politics towards
more political polarization
and incentives behind blockage obstacles
gridlock
and so that's where we see a fervent
debate today and we're responding
the expansion of ranked choice of choice
voting across the united states
the increasing presence of nonpartisan
primaries
and yet it still is faced with the
counter winds of money and politics and
gerrymandering of districts
but we're working through that are there
structural challenges of course there
are but that's been part of our history
here
it doesn't mean that we have a wholesale
default
problem of our our democracy that we
need to turn our back on
it means we need to be committed to the
relentless process of helping to
improve it make it more effective and
adapt it for modern circumstances
and that's what we see move forward and
two steps forward one step back
fits and starts political balance but
i'm not
overly concerned that we've got a
structural dysfunction that takes the
united states out of the game
we're coming out of this pandemic
vaccinating our population opening the
economy
unprecedented rates of of economic
growth
and one of the healthiest debates on
racial inequality that we've had that is
going to lead to change in progress
an unprecedented historic investments in
structural issues around
infrastructure around our democracy it
won't be linear
it won't be clean but the concept of
renewal at home
fueling a way to to renew democratic
leadership on the world
stage that's a direct connection between
what's happening domestically here
and internationally on the world stage
um uh neelam in india you didn't
you don't quite have the the history of
the united states of uh of what two
almost two and a half centuries now of
constitutional democracy but i mean
india is a very imp it's incredible i
think to many people that
indian democracy functions as well as it
does given how diverse a society and how
enormous the society is
is there a conversation going on in
india
about renewal and and
in fact structural change of the way
democracy is done my sense is that
is that what damon said is actually true
of most democracies there isn't
amongst the elites there isn't really a
conversation about actually
changing the way democracy is done for
example
really integrating the digital
revolution into the decision-making
process
everybody's interested in communication
through the digital revolution but
there aren't many people around talking
about you know a sort of digital
national assembly or something like that
where is the debate in india about
how democracy actually can or should or
maybe should not
uh develop
so i would say there's not much of a
conversation
because people are really shouting at
each other's so the ones who don't like
the way things are going
finding fault with everything and then
there are those who think
this is great i think
i would say that damon is probably right
in terms of saying that
at this moment the united states is
having the most
interesting conversation about race but
i would have to say that
after 400 years if they are still having
a conversation
and the situation relating to race it's
discouraging
just like in india it's very
discouraging
that we have not been able to move
ahead on caste related issues
and caste has become a big factor of
political mobilization
similarly religion which was not a
factor
for political mobilization in india has
become a really deep
fissure now maybe because we didn't
discuss it
and we wanted to bury the fact that the
partition of the country
was based on religion and for many years
nobody wanted to talk about it
i mean my parents are refugees from what
is now pakistan
and my family never wanted to discuss
the partition why it happened how it
happened
what what kind of deep trauma
was inflicted on various people so
i'd say we are all at different spaces
whether it the united states or eastern
europe
or wherever and it's very important to
recognize
these massive differences and not
try and comprehend democracy as if there
were
a one size that fits all we are at
different stages of
economic prosperity of race relations
of religious uh strife in fact
or you know so in india we are actually
not having
a very uh reasoned
fundamental conversation because we're
still at the stage of shouting at each
other
and i'm actually beginning to wonder
whether we need to continue
to deify the people where
democracies are now talking about the
people
in the same way as the marxists used to
and you will all remember that it was
said that you know
marxism likes the people it just doesn't
like
you so i think we need to understand
why is it that a majority of people in
all our countries are voting the way
they do
and the voting mostly i would say
even with all the challenges gives us
the results that it would
even if there are issues here and there
why is it that people vote the way they
do
what is it that is it's not just a case
of saying that
we have to talk to the people the people
don't want to talk to you
is the situation at the moment
i'm said and i think we all agree that
the the fate of american democracy is
vital to the whole
democratic project across the world but
india is also vital to that project i
mean
partly because it's the largest single
democracy and also it shows that
democracy can be done in a
very diverse society um it's also the
case of course that in asia there is a
competing
uh rival system for development
uh namely by communist china um ivan
i wonder how important you think that
the development success
failures of indian democracy are to the
wider question
of how democracy is perceived in the
world today
so let's be very frank i don't believe
that the fate of indian democracy is
what is going to shape
the opinion of bulgarian voters about
democracy india is extremely important
in the geopolitical context but people
are much more local and
provincial and no basically democracy
that they know
united states is different because of
the fact that basically
everybody particularly in central and
eastern europe for when they talk about
democracy was imagining the united
states
and the biggest thing that happened in
the united states honestly speaking
is contesting the election results it's
not how people
are voting this in democracy is very
important how parties are losing
elections
but while india is very important on one
theoretical level
listen people look the world that they
know
and of course knowing that india is a
democracy is very important but i don't
believe this is shaping
uh bulgarian voters also i do believe
that strangely enough we try to believe
that if there is a crisis of democracy
this is the same crisis
and listen you can be in a crisis for
different reasons based on different
experiences
and for me there are two things talking
about what is happening and not
happening that probably
important and we are not talking a lot
about our societies particularly in
europe are going to go through a major
demographic change and
we don't know how to talk about
demography from this point of view
pandemic was critically important
i'm going to give you south korean
numbers in other not just to stay east
european
to tell you what is going to happen in
the next 30 40 years if we basically
trust
demographers so in 30 years
the population of south korea when a
very well functioning and prosperous
asian democracy
is going to lose half of it population
because basically they have less than
one
uh child per woman 40
of people in south korea today live
in a single household you have basically
the new generation which have a totally
different experience and i'm saying this
not because it's good or bad
but because this is changing incredibly
the way all these functions
imagine that in 30 years in bulgaria
most probably
30 percent of the people on the labor
market are not going to have a voting
rights
because they're not going to be
bulgarian citizens
at the same time probably 15 of the
bulgarian citizens are going to live out
of the country
so they're going to vote but they're not
going to pay taxes in the country
and 40 of the voters are going to be on
the retirement age
at this very moment 40 percent of people
living in vienna
could not vote on the votes for the
mayor
of vienna it's not that we don't have a
political rights i have my political
rights in bulgaria i'm voting there
but you're living in vienna most of the
time and from this point of view this
changes
is totally changing the way democracy
functions
and i do believe we should be very much
open to this kind of a
bigger trend aging of the population
a major divorce between the labor market
and body politics
because it is not true that eastern
europe is close to foreigners
do you know which was the european union
member states that got most labour
immigrants
for the last three years before
immigration poland
so all these trends are there but when
we talk about democracy we
try to imagine that it is going to look
like as if before the crisis
in the way our economy is not going to
look the same
you cannot simply forget that digital
things happened our democratic societies
are changing
and i'm going to end up on this one of
the biggest problem that i see
particularly for central and eastern
europe
is a major generational divide that is
open as a result of it
younger generation is a small cohort
they don't have the numbers
and people don't like to play games in
which they cannot win
if you're a young person and basically
you want to go for change in your
country you have two options
one is to go through change through the
ballot boxes
if this is not happened either you're
going to stay on the street most of the
time basically try to show
that what is important for him should
happen or you're going to leave the
country
and believe me leaving the country is
much easier than the two previous
options
so from this point of view i do believe
probably we should think about
reducing uh the voting age we should try
to see how
this major generation of these balances
are going to be taken with
because uh the last point
of facts and type of appalling facts is
that
if you try to see the results of the
cambridge university
institute for the future of democracy
which was done in 2020
the younger people in the world
are the one most dissatisfied with the
performance of democracy
and millennials are much more
dissatisfied than the previous
generations on the same age
so from this point of view there is a
big use problem but not simply in terms
of the economy
but on the terms of political
representation and this is a very
distinctive generation
listen they have been born in a digital
world they experience the world
differently than us
so trying to empower the younger
generation politically in my view is one
of the major things that should happen
i think that this discussion is is
immensely rich and it's
multi-dimensional i think we we've got
sort of seven minutes left or so
um i think we need to to introduce
another really big dimension to this
discussion i mean i remember
i'm a child of the 1980s uh in the sense
i wasn't born in the 1980s unfortunately
but i achieved my sort of political
maturity in in the 1980s and
the tail end of the cold war and one of
the arguments that you will hear
in this discussion as to why populations
in established democracies have kind of
lost a certain amount of faith is
because unlike
the generation i'm talking about the
millennials prior to
to the millennials um people grew up
with a very
clear alternative you knew that there
was this totalitarian empire
and you knew it was very unpleasant to
live there if you
wanted to hold different opinions or if
you wouldn't simply follow
the ideology of a totalitarian system
and then that kind of disappeared
um through the 90s and 2000s and there
was really no
you know there was only one way to look
about democracy really and it was
inwards
and people because it's in the nature of
democracy to be critical
became self-critical and perhaps perhaps
went
to too much in that direction and failed
to recognize the value of what they had
but now of course um we do have a major
neo-authoritarian rival in the in in in
the form of china
i wonder kalinda whether you believe
that not that anyone would wish it to
happen
but given that there is this colossus
out there in
in asia which has a very different way
of of running a society
is that a kind of you know a sort of
load star it makes actual unity
and a renewed sense of the value of what
we have
easier to sell to our populations
well when we look at our own region um
people don't perceive china as much of a
factor
in terms of an example uh whether we
talk about
the system uh or democracy they
just perceive china as this huge country
who
is becoming a player on world stage and
uh there is desire i think on part of
the population to make that
uh relationship you know in terms of
cooperation
competition confrontation that is put in
the context of
the relationship with china towards more
cooperation and
of course people want security in their
life and stability and this is why
when you look at the polling results
that we saw earlier
that the most trusted institutions uh
are the armed forces the security forces
and uh partially the reason why we're
seeing all of these uh
developments is the sense of loss of
control which always
provokes fear and then there is tendency
in some countries to look at
an autocratic form of government as
being
uh more efficient in dealing with the
current problems because they
don't have uh the requirement of going
through sometimes a lengthy
parliamentary procedure process etc
and of course most people want to see
their problems sold
overnight they everybody wants a better
life
and in thinking about that they're also
questioning the value of democracy which
we cannot ascribe to
any uh geopolitical or geographical
regions of talking about western
democracy or indian democracy etc
we have these common and universal
democratic values that need to be
upheld but why our population
you know why are people losing trust in
government and institutions
uh in general it's uh the fact that
as i said they want to see change
overnight in particular
in central and eastern europe i think
we're still not happy with the level
of convergence that we have achieved
with the rest of the european union
so the efficiency of the governments is
questioned
in terms of not just democratic reform
but also being able to
implement the funding from the eu
building infrastructure
and really providing for circumstances
for people to change
ivan has mentioned demographic shifts
and
they are really quite worrisome in most
of our countries
people young people are leaving
countries not just for the lack of
opportunities but
also for disappointment that they feel
in the system
and one of the reasons being that we
still have not
dealt with corruption in an appropriate
way
we think tend to single out
some cases and focus on them but i
haven't
seen really a systematic attempt to
deal with corruption at all levels in
our societies
and secondly it's nepotism i asked a lot
of young people around the world
who come from croatia you know would you
return to croatia and they say
yes we would and we would ex
accept even a smaller salary
and a lower standard of living that we
get in some
other countries but the problem is that
we know
that we will not get an equal chance an
equal equal opportunity to compete for a
job
that nepotism is still there that there
are some people who are pre-ordained for
certain
functions so that's the problem of the
elites that they feel they have the
inherent right to power
yes and i think that this is a problem i
mean actually i spoke to francis
fukayama yesterday
yeah um on a panel and he um he he's
also referred to the sense of a gilded
insider class
which is very dangerous for democracy as
you say because it's very dangerous
that there is no way that they can make
it through then this is where they start
sort of
gestating on the ideas and feeling and
looking inwards we
literally have what well we have less
than one minute left we have but i'm
going to live we're going to
expand for just one minute and to ask
everybody very briefly i wish this
conversation could have gone on for two
hours
um do you expect in in a yes or no
answer which you can extend for
15 seconds i'll start with uh with
neelam
um do you expect that by mid-century
um democracy will be in a healthier or
less healthy state
globally that is and you can talk about
your own country than it is today in 15
seconds neil um
so i think it can be in a healthier
state
if we are willing to look inwards and
examine some of
our prejudices and to be
able to concentrate our energies
on addressing problems in
small bits you know in india we remember
always that gandhi had propagated
village republics
because the macro system has failed us
the u.n security council is neither
representative
nor does it function it could not meet
for the current pandemic yes it can be
better well neelam you'd like i did a
handbook for democracies about china
versus democracy and i
recommended that india should be a
permanent member of the security council
so we're friends i guess
um damon um again in 15 seconds do you
believe that by mid-century democracy
globally and in the united states will
be healthier or less healthy than it is
today
i do believe it will be healthier we are
going through a wrenching process of
self-correction which is essentially
renewal
and part of the part of what that can do
is catalyze renewal at home so that we
can work together as a free world to
end this democratic recession 15 years
of democratic recession
an opportunity to turn the tables on the
authoritarian march
and to catalyze a new democratic wave
but we start
by showing that democracy delivers at
home we show that the free society's
free world can work together to counter
the authoritarians
and we've got to stand together in
supporting those small d democrats
on the front lines of freedom and that's
a strategy for optimism for renewal
for democracy being in a better place in
mid
mid century well i'm great that you'll
be bringing that to that message and
that way of looking the world to the
national endowment for democracy which
is an immensely important
institution and congratulations again on
the new job ivan uh our bulgarians are
notoriously quite pessimistic people
aren't they so are you going to
be fulfilled the national stereotype are
you also going to be optimistic about
prospects for democracy by mid-century
listen it's going
to be better in some places and worse
than others
okay that's hedging the bets kalinda oh
i'm an absolute believer
in democracy to me there is no
alternative and i think that most people
want democracy and the benefits of
democracy but we
have to be willing and able
uh to adapt to the changing
circumstances in the world
and react to that um and be
proactive rather just then
trying to justify what we have done with
the again as i said painting the reality
that is different from what people
feel i'm taking this as an optimistic
way to end uh the panel and i'd like to
thank
everybody for joining us whether
remotely in the audience and most
particularly
uh to the four members of the panel for
for making such a great discussion in
such a short period of time please join
me in thanking our panelists
thank you
and uh
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