OSF's Malloch-Brown hopes leaders can break 'democratic dysfunction'

The world needs new leaders with fresh vision who can help rebuild political trust and shake off  “democratic dysfunction” that has thwarted a better response to the many current global crises, Open Society Foundations' Mark Malloch-Brown told Devex.

As governments struggle to contain the social and political fallout from ever-growing pressure sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic and worsened by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the OSF president painted a gloomy picture of the state of democracy — and the political will to reboot the development sector.

There has been a deterioration in democracy worldwide, he told Devex’s Editor-in-Chief Raj Kumar during the 2022 Devex World conference in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday.

“It's not doing great,” Malloch-Brown said. “There's no doubt about the trend line.”

He said he saw promise, however, from recent elections in Latin America, where leftist Colombian Senator Gustavo Petro, a former M-19 guerrilla with a progressive agenda to halt new oil projects, was voted president last month; and in Chile, where 36-year-old President Gabriel Boric championed a new constitution to enshrine environmental protection and Indigenous rights.

“It's easy to become quite, you know, overly gloomy,” said Malloch-Brown, who heads the world's largest private philanthropic funder of independent groups working for justice, democratic governance, and human rights. But “we've seen a rash of elections, and more to come in Latin America, which are returning really interesting, progressive, democratic governments to power."

Malloch-Brown slammed the West's handling of the pandemic and the unequal distribution of vaccines worldwide, where even now, billions of people have still not received their first shot.

"Trust is broken, you know, the betrayals of the COVID vaccine in inequity; the cumulative sense of a West that looks after itself first and leaves only the scraps from the table for the rest," said Malloch-Brown, who has also served at the United Nations and as a government minister under former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. That feeling "is now so profoundly built into the politics of a place like the United Nations.”

He said a “major reset” is needed, that includes “a massive upping and bigging up of our economic response” to crises — such as food, fuel and debt — and a reboot of international institutions to “shift them from their current donor-supplicant model to a cooperative model” with a “real sense of a shared destiny in a world that works for all.”

Such a readjustment may be stifled by “democratic crisis” and political difficulties in Western nations such as France, where President Emmanuel Macron has been “deeply weakened” in recent parliamentary elections, and in the United Kingdom, where Prime Minister Boris Johnson was forced to resign last week.

In the United States, President Joe Biden, whom he labeled a “decent man,” is “not rising to the occasion of what the world needs,” Malloch-Brown added.  

"It's just left leaders with no bandwidth and imagination.”

“This isn't actually about just encouraging Biden to be a bit more ambitious on what he'll put up to Congress; this is about a kind of generational change of leadership that I referred to in Latin America, which we'll start seeing in Asia, and which I hope will become the norm again in Africa,” Malloch-Brown said.

“You know, it needs new leaders with new kinds of visions for their countries, or a new and renewed hand across the ocean to each other around multilateral collaboration, to solve the problems they can't solve alone. So, I think we're on the wrong side, for now, of a generational shift in our politics, which will deliver that renewal that the system so evidently needs.”

Malloch-Brown also said OSF was a strong policy voice around issues like inequality, which he said is growing sharply and driving “dismay and disappointment and sense of democratic betrayal that is cursing so many democracies or bedeviling them.”

“Unless we get policy ideas out there and a debate around them, we just let this sort of Gini coefficient go wild,” he continued, “I think we’re never going to address this sense of democratic betrayal that, you know, is the root of the democracy crisis.”