The 55th annual World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, has long been seen as a major globalist event, but this year the leaders of the world’s most powerful nations are skipping the meeting.
President Donald Trump is scheduled to address the forum by video link on Thursday, but Chinese dictator Xi Jinping, Indian President Narendra Modi, French President Emmanuel Macron, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer are among the no-shows. The only G7 leader to attend in person is German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
“True, the prime minister of Spain is going to be there, and there are a couple of others, but the general picture of the heads of state, of government that are there is that it’s not the big players. I think if you went through a list of the G20, it’s going to be a small minority,” Leiden University professor of global transformations Jan Aart Scholte observed to CNBC last Thursday.
One G20 leader who made the trip was South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, who delivered an address on Tuesday. South Africa currently holds the rotating G20 presidency. Last year’s president, Brazil, did not send its head of state to Davos this year.
The libertarian man of the hour, Argentina’s Javier Milei, did make the pilgrimage to Davos, and so did Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, whose defense against the Russian invasion has been financed by much of the G20.
Milei’s speech to the WEF last year was a blistering 25-minute indictment of socialism, which was not welcomed by many of the attendees. His opening line was: “Today I’m here to tell you that the Western world is in danger – and it is in danger because those who are supposed to have to defend the values of the West are co-opted by a vision of the world that inexorably leads to socialism and thereby to poverty.”
Later, Milei said “the State is not the solution, the State is the problem,” which annoyed everyone in the audience who was not already furious at him for trashing socialism.
Milei returns to Davos this week with a year of undeniable economic achievements under his belt.
Trump is expected to deliver an address ideologically aligned with Milei’s. Neither of them will ever be part of the “in-crowd” at the WEF, but the in-crowd is no longer powerful enough to dismiss them with a sneer. According to Business Insider, Trump was the number one topic of conversation among WEF attendees on Day One.
“I don’t think that the promoters of a liberal, open world economy speak with quite as much disdain, let’s say, of contrary forces and views as they might have done, say, before the global financial crisis,” Prof. Scholte told CNBC.
The WEF issued a statement acknowledging that many big names were skipping this year’s event or sending lower-ranked representatives.
“We recognize that global leaders face a wide range of commitments and responsibilities, and their absence does not diminish our ongoing engagement with their respective governments and institutions throughout the year,” the forum said.
