 Honour guests, members, table representatives, partners, colleagues, and friends across the world, let me first convey a heartfelt thank you to all of you in the course of the last 25 hours of taking part in our 25th anniversary global summit in 12 different cities from Canberra, Arisababa, Stockholm, and Santiago. We have witnessed phenomenal conversations and the current challenges and opportunities for democracy. Conversations related to the future of elections, democracy development, inclusive participation, representation, and electoral justice. We have reiterated the importance of multilateral actions of collaboration and inclusion. We have pledged our commitment to sustainable democracy by starting a new workstream on democracy and climate change, and by making sure that democracy isn't only defending what reform and revitalize, and we have shown the breadth of our thematic and regional expertise. Our extraordinary network of partners and friends, and more importantly, the added value of our dual identity as the think and do tactic. Producing evidence-based, comparative knowledge used by real people in real-time, none of this would have been possible without the support of our 33 member states, our partners, and our wonderfully knowledgeable and dedicated staff. Don't see idea merely as a place to work, but as a way to contribute to a greater purpose, striving to defend and advance democracy at this most critical time. Your engagement and support are what sustains our institute. Thank you. I would also like to express my gratitude towards our current Chair, Sweden, as well as her focal points at the Department for International Law, Human Rights, and Treatment. Your long-standing support, your idea, and our anniversary has been vital to making this event a sounder's success. I would also like to convey a special thank you to all the member states who recorded and shared video messages for our 25th anniversary. We have taken your greetings and messages to heart, and consider them a strong sign of support for our work and men. Would like to thank each and every speaker, panelist, and moderator in our 12 webinars. Your contributions have enlightened us, and provided us with key insights for our current and future work. Your commitment to the democratic cause makes me feel more optimistic about the lives ahead. Finally, I would like to thank the staff of the International Idea for making our anniversary one of the true highlights of the year for the incident. It has been exhausting at times, but you both put in the long hours and carried the anniversary on your shoulders. I would like to extend a special thank you to the communications team, our IT team, our regional and country offices, and lastly to my team in the Secretary General's office. My special advisor, Alina Trunk, deserves enormous credit for managing the whole process with unfailing competence and dedication. In many ways, this conference was her brainchild, and hers is a big chunk of the credit. Last but not least, I would like to congratulate some of our staff members that have contributed to International Idea from its very inception. Our Facilities Officer at Headquarters, John Martinson, our Publications Manager, Lisa Hagman, our Administration Officer, Katarina Jergensen, and finally our Director of the Latin American Caribbean Region, Dr. Daniel Sovat. We are extremely grateful for your significant contribution to Idea during this past 25 years. At times of fickleness and lack of commitment, your loyalty to this institution is moving and inspiring. As for this conference, I cannot begin to do justice to the rich conversations that we have had in the last 25 hours, nor can I here highlight all the many thought-provoking enriching and stimulating discussions. But I would nevertheless like to highlight just a few that particularly well-resonated with our collective efforts to tackle the decisive challenges facing us today, such as climate change. Thomas Perothers spoke about three aspects that will be truly crucial for people working on strengthening democracy to succeed. We need to maintain the pressure against those undermining basic democratic tenants. We also need to ensure real solidarity between actors supporting democracy. We need to move towards mutual learning in the form of exchanges on an equal footing and walk away from the notions of assistance and those being assisted. Bia Mancini also raised what I found was a critical point. As democracies, we need to make room for and value experiments and innovation. One of the many strengths of democracy is that it allows societies to offer a range of different solutions to their problems. When it comes to climate change, for instance, thinking outside the box is thinking planetary. Leveraging digital technologies to help democracies think, deliberate and operate beyond the confines of nation states. We need to expand the frontiers of this possible. Thinking big, thinking brave, thinking bold is what we need when it comes to giving democracy a new lease of life. This point, Cristiano Figueres rightly mentioned that one of the biggest challenges of climate change might be the question not only how to craft institutions able to accommodate intergenerational issues in our democratic systems, but more fundamentally how to shift our political culture, cultural norms, and incentives to consider intergenerational interests already in today's political debates and decisions. These ideas, as well as many others expressed in our conference, give me hope, hope about our collective ability to defend democracy and equip democratic institutions to be ready for the future. We will carry these ideas forward, no work. My friends, there's nothing inevitable about democracy's future. It is a cause that requires our continuous dedication, vigilance, and support. Today, we stand at a crossroads. The challenges that democracy is facing are exceptionally stiff and impressive. Global inequality, disinformation, intolerance, polarization threaten to unravel the democratic progress achieved in the past half a century around us. This democratic progress is a sum of victories in the long road towards human emancipation and dignity. Intergenerations will ask what we did today to protect and advance this idea, these principles, these institutions that work with it to us as the fruit of countless human struggles. We need to forge the alliances and partnerships, global as much as local. Among all the governments, parties, civic actors, international organizations committed to the values of liberal democracy and the rule of law, we cannot do this alone. This is much bigger than any of us. We need to steal ourselves for a twilight struggle against the forces of authoritarians. This requires, first, that we detect, denounce, and counter the erosion of democratic principles and institutions. But it also requires just as much that we take a hard look into the way democracies are working today and try to make them better. We need to make sure that democracies live up to the promise of protecting the fundamental rights of human beings. Not just their civil and political rights, but also their social and economic rights. Not just rhetorically, but in reality. We need to make sure that every citizen has and feel that she has a stake in the survival of democracy. Democracy is a recent creation and it is recent because in many ways it swims against very powerful impulses of human nature. Democracy can only survive if it enlists the conviction, the energy and the passion of those that live on it. Citizens indifference towards democracy is a hard banger of democracy, but international idea we will continue to do our part in this struggle. We'll continue to help people around the world achieve the small victories that may inch them bit forward towards the fulfillment of the democratic ideals. We will do so as we do today by generating the knowledge products that can illuminate debates all over the world to reinvent them. We'll do so through efforts to assist electoral authorities in Nigeria and Bolivia to manage severe electoral risks. We'll do so through the advice we provide to draft constitutions to support difficult democratic decisions in the Gambia and Sudan. We'll do so through our work to bring around the table political actors that are literally killing each other in battle in Yemen. We'll do so through the support we provide to domestic election observers in Mozambique without whom the legitimacy of elections would surely be questioned and with it also the settlement that put an end to a brutal civil. We'll do so through our endeavors to train an entire generation of women leaders in power and Myanmar. We're making a real difference in bringing decency and compassion into the often barren landscape of all the decimals. This is the road we'll continue to travel on for the next 25 years and we hope to count on all of you our member states, our donors, our students, our partners and friends every step of the way. We hope it will come along in the knowledge that it is a road worth traveling and that has barely just started. Thank you very much.