Editorial Ta Nea: Summit for Democracy

The two-day Summit for Democracy hosted by US President Joe Biden is not simply a meeting for Western leaders to demonstrate that democracies can improve the lives of their citizens and offer solutions for the planet’s major problems, as this past summer’s White House announcement of the event noted.

It has the prospect of functioning as an alternative to the G20 and it constitutes an important move by participants on the international chessboard.

The exclusion of the “authoritarian International” – China, Russia, Hungary, and Turkey are not among the invitees – is an effort to draw a clear line between truly democratic states and authoritarian-style regimes, or “unfree democracies”.

It is a conceptual boundary between leaderships that respect human rights, active citizens, and democratic institutions on the one hand, and those that undermine centuries-old democratic advances on the other.

With its participation in the summit, Greece demonstrates that it has won a prominent position in the Western world, together with those who realise that democracy is a form of government for which everyone has a duty to work daily, for the prosperity of all of society.