 Yw Eileen. First Lady and gentlemen, it's my pleasure to welcome you to this session on democracy. My name is Adam Tu стол a I will have the honour, the real of moderating this extraordinary panel for us this afternoon. The title of the session is Democracy the Way Forward. It doesn't have a question mark but I think there's a slight sense of Anees about the title. Mae'r ffordd yw'r hynny yn ystyried. Mae'r haf yw'r ysgolwyddon yw'r mewn iawn, i'w wneud o'r rhaglen o'r ffawriddau a'r ffawrddau o'r ffawrddau sy'n gweld ar y cyfansbeth i'r ddweud o'r ffawrddau a'r ffawrddau o'r ddymogrofi rhaeg, oed o'r eraill o'r 70 o'r cwys i'r ddysgu cyffinio ar gyfansbeth, You could think to the moments of triumph in 89, but also of terror in 89 in China. You could think to the moments of kind of unipolar celebration, moments of insecurity and uncertainty and we are, as we speak, in the middle of a great clash in Ukraine in which the issues of democracy are engaged. But I think you could also put this question another way, which is to say that for democracy it's sort of iteratively essential to ask this question of where we go next, because the lawcresy is best understood not as a fixed set of principles, a set of structures, but really a challenge to collectively and through deliberative and intellectual processes decide where we go next. So in that sense you could remove the question mark and just say it's ordinary democratic business as usual, it's time to talk about what we're going to do next as usual. And I simply couldn't have asked for a more diverse and more extraordinary panel of people to be to be chairing today to do this, not one but two presidents, Rodrigo Chaves Robles or the President of Costa Rica next to me here, Eglis Llevis, the President of Latvia next to him, Tobias Bilström, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Sweden, Olexandra Mattychuk, who is chair of the Civil Liberties Union of the Ukraine, Lord Mark Maloch Brown, President of the Open Society Foundation and Samantha Power who is the administrator of the US Agency for International Development. So an extraordinary range of expertise and experience that we have in the room. In light I think of the essential importance of the struggle in Ukraine for the question that we're talking about, you'll forgive me and I hope the panellists will forgive me too for completely overturning if you like the onerific ranking of status here and turning to Olexandra to put the first question about the struggle that is going on in Ukraine. You observed this from both a bird's eye view but also on the ground in your efforts to document war crimes. Maybe looking forward because the dimension and the focus of this panel today is forward directed. Can you give us a sense of how you imagine a post war democratic recovery and reconstruction going on in the Ukraine? Russia started this war not in February 2022 but in February 2014 when Ukraine obtained a chance for a quick democratic transformation after collapse of the retrain regime due to a revolution of dignity. And all three months of revolution of dignity we as Ukrainian people are fighting for our democratic choice just for a chance to build a country where the rights of everybody are protected, government is independent and accountable, judiciary provide justice and police do not beat student demonstrations. And in order to stop us on this way Russia started this war because Putin is not afraid of NATO, Putin is afraid of the idea of freedom. And in this census this is not just a war between two states, this is a war between two systems authoritarianism and democracy. And that's why victory for Ukraine, it's not just to restore international order and push Russian troops out from the country, the occupied Crimea and other territories of Ukraine. Victory for Ukraine is succeed in democratic transformation and build a sustainable democratic institution. And success of Ukraine will have a huge impact to a democratic future of Russia itself and to other countries in our regions where there's freedom is shrink to the space of a prison cell. So in this regard we as Ukrainians ask for support of international community to make Ukraine win fast. Thank you. Thank you. And that is a message that has echoed out across war making for 100 years now. I mean this is an appeal, an appeal to link together the project of struggle and political reform and the establishment of democracy with an extraordinary resonance in European and world history. President Levitz, I mean your country is in its modern form was the creation of the first war in which that project was announced World War I and then its modern form, the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the war, yourself you were telling us in the green room ahead of time about your engagement in international meetings on new democracies in the 1990s. You have over 30 years of experience in the field, if you like, of securing, stabilising democracy. What are the sorts of lessons that stand out for you when we think about the future, the sorts of things that we should be focused on and thinking about from your vantage point in the Baltic cockpit really of history? Yeah. Yeah. From a historical point of view, democracy is a relatively modern democracy, new state order. It's only established in the 20th century, the first wave after the first World War, the second wave after the second World War and the third wave after the collapse of the Soviet Empire. But in between there was also difficult times for democracy and now 30 years after the third wave of democracy, we see that now there are also turbulent times for democracy. Democracy is challenged both from internal threats and external threats. External threats is also, as you rightly said, some aggressive authoritarian regimes are not only for economic reasons but also for ideological reasons trying to undermine democracies like here, Russia's war against Ukraine. But we can see also that in East Asia, there are also competition between authoritarian regime and democratic regimes. So these are external threats and we should be very strong to defence our countries, democratic countries. NATO is the world's strongest military alliance of democratic states. I want to stress that, of democratic states. So internal threats, it's much more complicated. Internal threats are in difference to the internal threats between the two World Wars when there was authoritarian ideologies which certain attractivity with strong leader and so on and so on. Now I see the main internal threat from populism. Populism is not advocating obligatory, a very strong leader as authoritarian leader but is attacking the representative democracy. Representative democracy is relatively slow, slow state order, but it is, I would say, in a complex world, in a complex society, the only possible way to come to reasonable solutions. And then there is artificial contradiction which is put forward by populists between direct democracy and representative democracy. And I think what we can do, so in Latvia, there are no other anti-democratic movements or organisations and so on because we know very much the value of democracy, this experience of Soviet colonialism, Soviet imperialism, it is still there and we draw the conclusions and therefore Latvia is one of the more stable democracies I think in these terms, but in countries where such experience, negative experience is not there. Then of course we should draw the attention on populism and try to convince the population to trust the representative democracy and the core issue is a trust, trust or mistrust to the legitimate or legitimate institutions of democracy. I think this is a core issue and then we can ask how to build the trust, how to increase the trust, but trust is a core issue. Thank you for laying it out like that. Staying in the regions for just one more phase of this. Prime Minister Bilström, I mean your country has made a momentous decision, always a making in the process of making a momentous decision precisely with regard to its external security arrangements. It's also a country which has seen dramatic change in the composition of its party spectrum. How do you see the war in its current form, what kind of a challenge do you think it represents for the European project of democracy and for your country in particular? Well thank you very much, yes. Russia's unprovoked, illegal and unjustified aggression on Ukraine is a huge challenge to not only this continent but to the entire world. It shows I think that democracy is vital for peace and for human security. I would also like to underline that it is a fact that you know we know very well that two democracies don't make war against another called the democratic peace axiom I think it's called in academic studies. And I think from this follows that a more democratic Russia would not have broken the peace in Europe. And so to answer your question, Europe's democratic project is therefore a vital part of our security policy and it is viewed as such by the Swedish government definitely. We also have to understand that this aggression by Russia, the overturning of the security order of Europe, well that also follows that Russia will become more authoritarian along with other states like Belarus. And that means that we have to step up, we have to invest more in human rights defenders and civil organisations and we have to increase the efforts to make freedom come true in parts of Europe whilst freedom is still not existing or enjoyed by civil or political rights. And finally, Olexandra, since you are here I would like to turn to you specifically and say that, you know, not only on behalf of Sweden but also of the presidency of the European Union, we will be with you to the end. There is no alternative to you winning this war and we have to step up our efforts in order to see to it that you win the war on the battlefield but also that you win the peace once the war is over. But you can make a rebuilding of your society and this is something which I feel very strongly about having been to Kiev just a few, just a month ago together with all the Nordic Baltic ministers of foreign affairs. We travelled to Kiev and met President Zelensky and his cabinet and I'm so astonished by the fighting spirit of your people and the efforts that you are doing. We will be there for you to the end. President Rogels, we've only turned to you. You have a connection to the Ukraine. You work there in your World Bank days. You also are to the fore amongst your Latin American peers in having addressed the war and its legality. You also, along with the United States, co-chairing and co-hosting the summit of democracies. You're in a privileged vantage point from your point of view in the Western Hemisphere and really giving us a perspective on how you see this drama unfolding and its implications for the democratic project worldwide. Well, I come from a very different country. We were the first country in the world, I believe, to abolish its own military. We made it forbidden by constitution and we adopted the rule of law. We adopted democracy long time ago. As a matter of fact, in the 200 years since we got independence, we have had tiny little periods where democracy was, say, interrupted. Six weeks in 1948 with a revolution, a period in the 1850s that had a very small dictatorship. Personally, I do have that connection because I work in Ukraine. I live on Cresciatica Street right there in front of the market. I saw the struggles in the early 2000s of the Ukrainians trying to rebuild their economy when it was melting during the crisis. In that sense, and having worked in the former Soviet Union, when I became president, I used the words that the foreign ministers didn't just use the criminally legal attack of Russia to Ukraine. I was taken to court in my own country in the present because I was violating Costa Rican's neutrality. The court said, no, the president can't say what the Costa Rican people think and what he thinks. We are not sending an army because we don't have one. Democracy has its quirks too. It was the right of the people who took me to court. At the same time, we had a cyber attack associated to Russia. You see the president speaking is causing all these things. Well, ladies and gentlemen, as Churchill said, democracy is the worst form of government for others. That's the one we have. It's the least imperfect, but it requires courage. It requires saying what we believe. It requires taking stance. It's true that a government subject to the political marketplace is less likely to take violent action against others. There are negative externalities to the world of not having democracies around. It's in our common interest that democracy is enjoyed by all men and women in the world. I think that we have our challenges even in Latin America whereby the challenge is not electing democratically a government. The challenge is that democracy to be sustained has to be profitable to the people. The quality of services dealing with the crisis that we see of immigration. Look at my poor country, 5.2 million. We have the largest number of requests for asylum in the third largest in the world in absolute terms. After the United States of Canada, we follow. We have more than 20% of our people are economic immigrants or political refugees. So I think democracy will continue in my imagination. I cannot imagine a better way of electing governments, but we also need to be more courageous, be more accountable and be able to deliver what most people want. Share prosperity, peace and a better future for our children. That is where democracies are struggling today to achieve that, and certainly it would be in our interest that most countries in the world are democratic. Administrative power, can I turn to you of this extraordinary panel up here? You have perhaps the most capaciously global perspective in your position in US development policy. Do you see a kind of road map, a vision for the democratic project in the 21st century, a distinct clear future outline? Or is it more a question of working at the nuts and bolts as President Robles has laid out for us, delivering the basics and moral courage, some sort of combination of bread plus ethics, bread plus morality? First, I think there is a path. It's a bit of both, I think, the tactical and then having the lodestar that the President of Costa Rica just spoke to. But I think even the language of democratic decline, which is ubiquitous, 16, 17 years of democracy and decline, I think is misleading. Democracy is under attack. It's under attack, as Alexandra said, and as we all know from without, from authoritarians, and increasingly within even established democracies, it's under attack from within. And so it's not a kind of force of gravity or natural trends. It is individuals that are making choices to support undemocratic and repressive elements or to outright use brutal military force. I think what we've tried to do at USAID is kind of step back and say, OK, just because we've promoted democracy in certain ways for all these years, given that we have this moment that's been protracted one, let's step back and say, what do we need to do differently? What do the new coalitions need to look like? What does the toolkit need to look like? I'll just give a couple examples of what I think needs to be part of this toolkit in that roadmap. One of the weapons of the autocratic and authoritarian and the oligarch is the lawsuit. It isn't just arrests and violence of the kind that we've seen for generations. It's let's put a civil society organization out of business. Let's put a small newspaper out of business or a social media person who holds someone accountable. And so we've created something, launched something called reporter's shield, which is a fund to ensure to provide insurance to those reporters and those civil society organizations that just can't afford to insure themselves. The structural advantage that a state has that an oligarch has is unsurmountable for so many of these actors. That's one example of like a new tool. What is the weapon of choice? OK, let's think about what is the way to combat that. Second, I think we've in the past and finally, I should say, we have used democracy assistance to support election monitors, to support independent media civil society is what we should. We've focused less in thinking about promoting democracy on surging support that pays economic dividends when there is a reform opening. So that is the approach we are trying to see. When you see the president of Zambia who was arrested, I think, something like 15 times and was barely allowed to campaign against the prior administration last month, getting rid of criminal defamation of the president for the first time. When you see the president Moldova fighting corruption and pushing for judicial reform. When you see President Lasso in Ecuador, I believe, is here trying to integrate 500,000 Venezuelan migrants in the way that he has done. But with elements that, again, want to set back democratic progress, what are the things we can do in the economic space to support those political reform openings? And so I just give one example there. I mean, I think public-private partnerships, given our audience, have to be at the heart of this. When there are bright spots, please, businesses, take note. Just spend that extra time getting to know whether there's an investment opportunity in countries that are doing hard things, that are fighting for more transparency, fighting those anti-democratic forces. We are announcing today actually more support for something called the Global Alliance for Trade Facilitation that was developed in conjunction with the World Economic Forum. And that's basically private sector actors coming forward and saying, business is really hard to do in this country for these reasons. USAID, other development actors, governments, can you make it easier? Can you get rid of the sludge? Can you get rid of the paperwork? We are going to surge support to Ecuador, Tanzania, countries like that that, again, are doing those hard things to try to facilitate trade and not merely, again, the classic toolkit for democracy promotion. Fascinating. I was going to turn to you, George Maloch Brown, and ask a question that headed in the slightly opposite direction, because I take the point of administrative powers intervention to say we need to be tactical. We need to respond to circumstance. We need to respond to the moves of our enemies. We need to respond to emergency. The question I was going to ask you was about institutions, about the long-term structure within which democracy functions. They clearly are pivotal to success. Can they also become a fetter? How do we think about the role of institutions? Well, Adam, thanks. And I think I would hate to lose in Sam's very powerful response core point that it's not so much that democracy is failing. It's attackers are attacking it. And I think it behows all of us at Davos, not this panel, which is very enthusiastic for democracy, but the sort of world-weary delegates, or world-weary delegates about democracy out there, to bear in mind that the most enthusiastic voices for democracy this week in Davos are the Ukrainian voices. Why? Because there's a country attacking their democracy. And we shouldn't all need that external threat to share Ukrainians' enthusiasm for a democratic future for all of us. I think that's the right starting point. At Omsati, we spend an awful lot of money every year trying to support democracy and its institutions. I mean, just I hope, Adam, without straying from your question, I mean, there were a couple of lessons which I'm not sure whether they're scientific or not, but which I've seen watching our portfolio at work all over the world is, one, given the global demographics of an increasingly young population in many parts of the world, social movements are a better investment than political parties. Social movements are the funnel by which younger people come into politics. And whether I'm talking about the state of Georgia in the US or Latin America or Africa, I see that in much of our work. Secondly, election bodies and monitors is often not a very well-placed investment. Disinformation and trying to contain that seems to have a much greater outcome in terms of whether the ones who really want get to claim that victory or not. The third, and this is an obvious one, is the idea of democracy is much less powerful than the delivery of democracy. People are quite pragmatic nowadays. They're not terribly interested in many countries in being engaged in a civic debate about its value so much as is it delivering for us. And a fourth one is a sort of stability versus change point. I spent a decade of my life as a political consultant, all over the world, and some years into it, with one of my colleagues was drinking Pisco sowers in Lima, Peru, a country whose own democracy is now under challenge. And he said, you know, we've spent a lot of money around the world on polling. I think it all settles down to one line. Is this election about change or is it about stability? And in those days when I did this, they're about 50-50. But if you work that out and if your candidate was a candidate of change in a change election you won, if your candidate was a candidate of stability you didn't and vice versa, one of the challenges today is actually pretty much every election is about change. There is a deep, profound dissatisfaction with the status quo in nearly all our countries. And what's viewed as a vote against democracy and for populism is often actually a vote against incumbency. Incumbents are not popular because they're not rising to the challenge of governance. And hence to my final point, I mean, I think all of us, whichever region of the world we come from, are living at a moment, if I put it like this, without a paradigm. We know what the past was, we don't know what the future looks like. We know we came out of what people call a neoliberal order with a sort of market fundamentalist approach to making money and a limited view of what government's role should be. It's failed people everywhere, whether it's racial minorities in the United States or my own country, the UK, whether it's great groups of marginal people elsewhere. So that need for a paradigm which brings us all back onto the same terrain of what we expect from government, both nationally and globally, is for me a prerequisite to democracy working again because democracy is between two teams on the same playing field. At the moment, they're playing on different playing fields. So one of the preconditions for democracy to function is a degree of self-discipline on the part of the players and I have to congratulate my panel of six, every moderator's nightmare panel of six, for the self-discipline which has allowed us to get to this point, which means there will be questions from the audience. So by all means begin to stack up in your mind a question for the last five to 10 minutes and before we turn back to the panel. And I would invite also the panellists to imagine intervening, but it seems to me that there is really an irrepressible need to come back to the dialogue that's implied between Lord Malach Bound's intervention and your statement, President Roeblers, which is essentially on the same page. We have this terrible tradition of having both last names, but I'm chavis. Forgive me, forgive me. That's okay, my mother's name is very good. But the same issue is this issue of delivery, right? It's this issue which was key to your understanding. Look, I have a distinction that may not make a big difference from what Lord Malach Brown and Samantha said. I treat you on a first-name basis, don't worry. Look, if you accept democracy as the rules of the game, you have to accept that there's going to be contestation and accept the outcomes. Of course there is a huge change. There is a big vote for change rather than continuity. And the reason is that the humanity, by and large, with few exceptions, wasted, in a way, for a large portion of the population, the great moderation, the huge benefits of technological change in the sense that we saw a huge concentration of wealth. So this is the 90s, the 2000s? The 90s, early 2000s, the great moderation, low interest rates, good prices for commodities, technological advance, and then the tide lifted all votes, but lifted some votes like this. The United States is the big example, right? You know, the Midwest, the Roosevelt, and so on, and lifted some other votes like this. And humans said, naturally, whoops, that doesn't work for me. My hemisphere has taken a huge turn. I am the result of change. Eight months before the election, nobody knew me. I had no party, no money, no basis. But people in Costa Rica were fed up with the traditional parties, and we had 27 parties, never in my country, we had that. And when you say the democracies under attack, not democracies, not under attack, the strength, the success of the attack depends on the strength of democracy. We had always fringe parties all over the world, and I don't want to mention countries specifically, but in some countries that were traditionally democratic where those fringe parties would have never made it to the headlines are empowered today. So, of course, because ideas and institutions in a democratic system need to compete and know that there's going to be constant, constant contestation, is that an English word, of who holds the power. So we say, oh, the freedom of the press is important. In Latin America, including my own country, some media were instruments of oligarchic control of democratic processes, some, a few. In one of the better functioning democracies in the world, thank God. However, came social media and challenged that. I would have not been president of my country had it not been for social media. I had the traditional media against me. Absolutely, still. Well, yesterday a poll was released, and I don't mean to say this bragging. I am the most popular president in history of my country at this stage of time with the media against me. So what we need to realize, ladies and gentlemen, is that the rules of the game within democracy, the bounds changed. And we cannot pretend that the old institutions and so on is going to maintain what we like. We have to fight for it. And there is only one way, the legitimacy of the democratic state. And that legitimacy depends on what the man and women of the streets, who are not politicians in their enormous majority by vocation, find whether they find that the state of democracy is delivering for them. And that's what we have failed to realize in many of the countries in my region, including my own. Sorry for being a bit too passionate, but I think those are distinctions that may not make a difference. In my view, they do make a difference. Olexandre, if I may turn to you, because as it were, yours is the most extreme case that we could possibly be facing. And you spoke eloquently and forcefully about the stakes in the war being the preservation of Ukrainian democracy against this legal aggression. But democracy is, the other panelists are describing it as a messy business. It's a contested business. It's a dirty business. So this thing that we are, you, your people, are laying down their lives to defend is ambiguous, to say the least, a prize to win. Do you have a vision of how a Ukrainian democracy emerges? It presumably is not a vision of a return to the status quo ante before the war, is it? Or do you have a vision of how a democratic politics could be animated by, informed by, inspired, changed by the war? We live in a very interconnected world, and only spread of freedom make our world safer. That's why I would like to tell not only about Ukraine, but about the problems of democracy in the whole world, and emphasize on two points. First, new technologies provides opportunity for rapid dissemination of information and new forms of association without any ties of national borders. But parallel, new technologies provide possibilities to segment horizontal networks to manipulate public opinions by controlling flow of information and analyzing personal data. And our future in this digital era can be very different. We can use example of China, which tried to build digital dictatorship with a social rating system. And as a human rights defender, I sound an alarm because we must find a new ways how to protect freedom of expression, access to information, and defense of privacy in new digital era. And second, in my novel lecture last year, I mentioned that we must return the meaning to human rights. Human rights is a volume. It's not just the words which we have to repeat because it's supposed to be heard from us. It's mean that human rights has to become a basis for political decision like economical benefits and security issues in internal policy and external policy as well. We are responsible for everything which is going on in our planet and country which systematically violates human rights obligations. Is a threat not only to their own citizens. Is a threat to the region and to the whole world. Right. OK. So we in that sense come back to the liberal democratic peace thesis which anchored your observations also for our minister in the sense that a society which is bound by the rule of law and bound by the principles of democracy is going to be a society that's more pacific, less dangerous. This issue of technology however rides across very many of the observations people have been making. Mark, you and I in the lounge earlier on this morning we're talking about digital voting and technology as part of the sort of armory that could be mobilized to well just make democracies run on time, right. And to avoid the catastrophic humiliating display of electoral systems in some countries we could easily name. Do you what do you see as the kind of costs and benefits of technology to the mechanics of democratic process and why do they matter? Thanks Adam. I mean I get exasperated because actually electronic systems well run and well managed with the right kind of controls you know are the best way of assuring that votes are counted properly. Now those controls include civil society access at the point of voting and vote counts tabulated and declared locally before they're sent to a national count but if there is proper civil society involvement at each step or party involvement, party observer involvement you can get a highly accurate quick vote which is almost immune to electoral theft or distortion. The difficulty is that you know people are so spooked by the idea of this sort of black box nature of vote counting that you know we've failed to train our civil society partners in effectively monitoring these systems so you know whether it was recent elections in Kenya and some other places I can name. Well I mean Brazil which has, the Brazil system is the best in the world by anybody who I think you know follows these things it has a branch of the judicial system supervising it it spends 300 million I think every five years renewing its system it's a model and yet of course the whole purpose of this intervention last weekend the attack on the congress came from the allegation that the election had been stolen, that it was fraudulent similar claims in Kenya and many other countries often by our grantees so I don't want to take sides on the point but this lack of sophistication about electronic systems is very damaging and of course you know they're very easy to discredit because it is a machine counting the votes and so the US system is going backwards you know the reaction to these extraordinary scenes of delayed counting in the 2020 election is not more electronics and updated machines it's in many places to pull it back to hand voting where in a highly politicised context where one side has tried to replace sectors of state and other election officials it potentially in the midterms stopped a lot of this but it was potentially creating a whole new avenue for electoral threats at the hand counting level so you know I think it's time we kind of got a bit smarter about our election systems President Levitts I want you to come in and then Mr... Yes, I think digital technology and democracy is a new problem and we should solve it from the point of view of democracy You spoke about a rather technical issue of the voting system electronic voting I think this is possible to organise such a voting that it is secure and so on I think a much more bigger challenge is the digital technology and the building of public opinion This is the content of the public opinion how it is organised and how it is manipulated and whether we can somehow distinguish between genuine public opinion and manipulated public opinion Someone here in the room also spoke about oligarchs and they have press and so on By digital technology, by social networks it is much more easier to manipulate the public opinion and then I think this is an absolutely new situation and we should think about how to deal with that Also the role of the intermediars like Facebook you can write on Facebook and there are maybe spread in for 10 people or for 10,000 people but it is up to Facebook to decide on that and how they are deciding Also this is not transparent and I think all the problems are new problems and we should also buy on theoretical and in practical way to try to solve This is a special issue which deserves a special discussion but I want to say that this is a new challenge to democracy It is also, at the beginning of democracy there was also Napoleon He has organised referendums on his laws He remained an authoritarian ruler but 95% of the population voted for him Now in the age of digital technologies it is also possible and I think we should organise some kind of safeguards but this is a special discussion The true nightmare that is revealed both in the US and the Brazilian case is it becomes political all the way down so that you cannot make that neat division between what you might think is the mechanical process is simply deciding yes, no which way does this, which box does this vote go in and the inflamed global discussion about what's happening in American democracy or Brazilian democracy and that, I mean we on this in our hemisphere have experienced it's truly shaking when it happens to you I mean when you do not know whether the patently mathematically correct outcome of a counting process we're not talking about calculus here we're simply talking about adding numbers up will not yield the outcome that it clearly should and even that can be shaken and this is where the mechanics do become quite important because you need those to be as watertight as transparent as possible but administrative powers you would come in Well I wanted to come in to tie the three big themes that we've discussed so far together Ukraine, where everything hits home and everything matters technology which you've introduced and people have spoken to and so at the centre of where democracy is going and then this question of delivering and I want to bring it back to Ukraine one of the things that we, when we think about Ukraine of course we think first of the incredible courage of the people and everything that they are going through right now we think of the volunteers and the grassroots mobilisation we think of the grotesqueness and the brutality of Putin and his forces we don't really think about technology but Ukraine is one of the globe's great trailblazers right now in terms of technology and President Zelensky came along in around 2019 and he said he wanted to put the state in a smartphone and as Alexandra can attest and she could even show us on her smartphone USA partnered with the Ukrainian government in 2019 and helped them build something called DIA which is an app that now has 120 services for citizens on it it includes everything from get your birth certificate, your debt certificate pay your taxes it has been pivoted in the conflict to be able to get benefits to displaced persons from the beginning was tending to pensioners and start a business through DIA and it does two things it delivers, it helps citizens feel connected 18 million of the 30 million adults in Ukraine have this app DIA and use it it actually because of geospatial recognition it can tell you where a displaced person has moved to it can report to a family property damage even if they are living in Germany about what has happened but the second thing it does is it allows citizens to hold their government accountable because it renders much more transparent processes that for too long were susceptible to corruption and to see now there's going to be a lot of reconstruction in Ukraine many of the people who are gathered here in Davos I hope we're going to be part of that the reconstruction needs to happen now and not await the ultimate disposition now every repair matters now well with DIA you can actually at every construction site in Ukraine there's a permitting process somebody has to figure out who's actually doing the rebuilding and there's a QR code at the construction site you hold your phone up you get the QR code it tells you who has the permit you can actually access the contracts that went into the rebuilding so we have to remember in Ukraine there are two wars there's the war that is on the front page of every newspaper and there's this war the war that Alexandra and her peers are a part of which is strengthening democracy fighting corruption and making this an exemplar for how we harness technology for good again not and withstand the worst misappropriation of it but recognize how connected it can be to delivering for citizens that's a fascinating example and arguably another incredibly dramatic exercise of an even larger scale is obviously India's experimentation with various forms of digital citizenship which at a rough approximation reach 100 times as many people they can essentially provide basic digital services and benefits to 1.4 billion people that obviously has a huge potential to be exploited also for populist purposes you can target the bread and circuses at the phone that will also deliver cheap cricket broadcasts so you can secure a kind of populist consent through these mechanisms but they certainly have the effect of tying citizens to the state making the state visible in the medium that's most available we're going to go to questions in just a second but I think it will be remiss given the agenda of the forum over so many years now and I don't have a particular person in mind so I'm hoping somebody will pick this up and run with it for me but we also address the issue of sustainability and the enormous challenge I think for democracies on the one hand of as it were basic delivery of survival of intense existential crisis of the avoidance of decay but there is also this challenge without which democracies will fail collectively to address the future in the most ambitious sense in other words fit for 50 carbon targets that go to 2030 these kind of dimensions and it seems to me that that too is something that we that we have to have answers for as Democrats and there's an obvious suggestion that authoritarians perhaps because they're more long lived they have longer time horizons they aren't facing 18 month electoral cycles have an advantage here does anyone on the panel maybe will throw it out this way have a feeling yes sir thank you very much thank you I Costa Ricans not me Costa Ricans in general can talk a little bit about sustainability we went we were the first country in the world to not only stop at reverse tropical deforestation we went from about 24% of tropical of forest coverage to more than 55% we have 100% of electricity generated through basically 100% through renewable sources so and we did it in democracy and you did it can I just ask is it is it because it's cheaper and better or because it's a good business opportunity in the green modernisation in ecotourism is that what I was going to say when it became when a tree was worth more with what we call the lazy little birds how do you call them in English losositos perezosos sloths that is sloths is worth more much when people take selfies next to it right so people don't want to cut the tree we made it a good business which is a requirement for sustainability you can and should sweeten it you can and should swim against the right currents but you can never do it forever democracy is at its lowest as we said they don't cause revolutions because of the political cycle, time horizon but we managed to create a national consciousness Costa Rica is the only country in the world where all forms of hunting and trapping of wild animals and keeping them at home are illegal, you are prosecuted and you go to jail if you keep one of our gorgeous Scarlett Macaus at home my grandmother had many, today is impossible so that's what I wanted to say there is no contradiction between the rule of law, democracy and managing intelligently the environment I think that's a lesson that is worthwhile taking a look at because it became profitable and Adam can I just add one sentence it's not actually this idea that autocrats do better because they think more long term the evidence really isn't there autocrats look over their shoulder they think short term there's no suggestion that China for example really has a longer term development strategy for dealing with the green transition than the US a weak democratic president weak in terms of his congressional majority has put through the IRA China doesn't stand up much better so I think the fact is it's all about leadership democrat or authoritarian it's all about persuading those who support you your constituencies, your stakeholders that this vision matters now and for the future it's going to deliver cake today and tomorrow and that's the challenge of politics everywhere nor should we be spooked by bad theories about how democracies work and don't work following on from there I've got one question at the back there I'm going to take a couple so the gent in the glasses he had his hands up for and then the lady with the glasses there so I'll couple those two and then wow we are busy okay so hello thank you my name is Vince Chedrick I'm a journalist with Devix I've got a question for Administrator Power in Brussels where I work people increasingly we felt the impact in the last few years of what happens when people feel democracy at home isn't working for them I'm thinking about Brexit and perhaps other examples I wanted to raise with you the 2019 book winners take all the eliturate of changing the world which I know you read and were influenced by and you told the author that there needed to be a reflection about what that book meant for the international aid industry and I'm wondering now four years later what that reflection is thank you lady here also with the glasses maybe a mic in there quick quick keep your hands up so I know where I'm going hi good afternoon Maria Tressa with Voto Latino we are the largest voter registration outfit in the country in the United States having registered close to 1.4 million individuals and touching roughly 11 million people a month one of the questions I have is specifically when are we going to start talking about cyber insecurity and disinformation as really a tactic for cyber war and I think Alexandra you mentioned it most and then Mr Levitz used it as well when we first started our job was simply to register voters but at the rise of disinformation I would say is one of the things that were resulting in real online tactics actually translating into on the ground in Ukraine we saw Putin's force in a real way undermining democracy January 6th we saw the right wing and other elements of foreign interference that basically went from cyber insecurity to the big lie to filling and really trying to destabilize democracy so one I ask one of the things that you created is so successful is the use of disinformation and battling it among your people to inoculate them from bad information but also how can we proceed to start enabling it what it is which is we are at cyber war within but also external thank you so much because it's easy there's a gentleman next to you and they go with the same mic and then along to the gentleman well my name is Humberto Rumbos I'm a global shaper from Caracas, Venezuela and as the president of Latvia said we are from the new challenges new digital challenges that need to be addressed globally and continuing to this question and the digital environment doesn't belong to a country or to a region but to the whole world and for example in Venezuela in 2022 there were massive campaigns of disinformation about the situation in Ukraine about the invasion of Russia and if you can attack those problems in Europe there will always be other attacks in other regions like Venezuela, Cuba and in Caragua for example so my question is for the chief of state and who are in the head of their government about have you think about what you can do as a chief of state to address these challenges and if you have it will be great to know more about those thoughts I hate to do this but we've got four minutes on the clock and those are three great questions and we've got six panellists so I am going to have to wrap I'm so sorry maybe we can have some responses to these excellent questions we have the issue of oligarchy winner takes or we have the issue of misinformation we have the issue to the heads of state in particular of how to address the sort of cross-contamination from struggle to another where do we start Alexander would you like to I will start with a concrete example I'm a human rights defender and work directly with people who went throughout the hell I worked with people who survived from Russian captivity and they told me horrible stories how they were bitten, raped how their fingers were cut how they were smashed into wooden boxes how they were tortured with electricity one woman told me how her eye were dug out with a spoon so this story is a story of young woman from Donetsk she was arrested because she has pre-Ukrainian views in her country in her native town which is under Russian occupation she was tortured very severely regardless of the fact that she was pregnant she begged not to beat her because she is waiting for a child but she got a response you have a pre-Ukrainian sympathise so your child has no right to be born and then she was told okay we will release you if you will tell Russian journalists that you are a sniper for sure she agreed and this so-called Russian journalist arrived and started to make this video with her and one details was shocked me very much that when these journalists understood that she is a pregnant they asked her to sit in a post to hide your pregnancy because it's ruined the whole plot of this of the story and I don't have a concrete answer to your question how to deal with this information but I totally believe that we have to provide justice and these people who work at the part of military machine to incinent hatreds has to be responsible I think we stop there thank you very much I think this was an amazing panel