“This order is not working entirely well (…) because we have not demonstrated in recent years our ability to prevent these conflicts or to resolve them,” declared the French president in front of the other leaders.
Emmanuel Macron strongly criticized global governance on Monday at the G20 summit in Rio de Janeiro “which doesn’t work” and made press releases “quite a few people” read, proposing a group “high level” to work on its redesign.
“This order is not working entirely well, and I say that to be polite and understatement, because we have not demonstrated in recent years our ability to prevent these conflicts or resolve them”declared the French president in front of the other leaders of the great powers, concerning the wars in Ukraine or the Middle East in particular. “We have insufficient representation”he added, referring to the lack of weight of several large emerging countries in major world bodies.
“While we always issue press releases, I believe that lucidity must lead us to say that relatively few people read them”he quipped, while dozens of advisers work hard in Rio to find consensus on a joint declaration. “A normally constituted citizen cannot think, when we return to the country, that we have made global governance work wonderfully.”
“We’re going to do it” specialists
According to the French president, in power for seven years and who presents himself as a “veteran” of these cenacles, “the risk is great to have the same meeting in a year, with the same people, and to say “we are going to do it”, and to be the specialists in “we are going to do it””. He proposed to Brazilian President Lula, who is this year at the head of the G20, and to South Africa, which will host him in 2025, to create “a high-level working group” to floor on “some construction sites” overhaul of this governance and submit a “Rio-Johannesburg road map” which can be adopted in a year.
Emmanuel Macron also deplored that “several” countries at the G20 “do not respect” the Charter of the United Nations, of which they are “all signatories”targeting in particular Russia for the war it has been waging in Ukraine since the 2022 invasion. The French president, who estimated on Sunday that the “context” did not lend itself at this stage to a new exchange with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, briefly shook the hand of the head of Russian diplomacy Sergei Lavrov during a family photo at the G20, but the two men did not really speak.
