The World Is Suffering from Too Much Male Leadership
Originally published by Leena Misra for India Express
Ireland’s first woman president Mary Robinson (80), who served from 1990 to 1997, was on a visit to Ahmedabad-based Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) earlier this week. She also inaugurated a solar park set up by SEWA at Dhrangadhra. She has been the chairperson of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) and co-founded Project Dandelion, a women-led global campaign for climate justice. In an exclusive interview with Leena Misra, she spoke on the “immediate existential threats” posed by the executive decisions of the newly elected US president Donald Trump and termed the closing of USAID as “brutal”. Excerpts:
IE: How do you see President Trump’s exit from the Paris Agreement, WHO… panning out?
Mary Robinson: Very difficult moment actually… We are seeing populism and autocratic governments globally and now we have a bad leader in the United States, and his voice is being amplified by the techno billionaires particularly (Elon) Musk and it is undermining truth, undermining democracy in the US. The way he is trying to break the federal system — I have never quite seen anything like it. I think a lot of it is not going to necessarily happen because Congress may not agree. There are checks and balances, but they have been weakened. And all of this is not good for a world where we already had a fractured multilateral system.