The top official at the United Nations said that the coronavirus pandemic will bring about a “new model of global governance.”
“To close those gaps, and to make the New Social Contract possible, we need a New Global Deal to ensure that power, wealth, and opportunities are shared more broadly and fairly at the international level,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said about gaps “in governance structures and ethical frameworks” exposed by the pandemic. “A new model for global governance must be based on full, inclusive, and equal participation in global institutions.”
The 71-year-old Portuguese socialist continued: “A New Global Deal, based on a fair globalization, on the rights and dignity of every human being, on living in balance with nature, on taking account of the rights of future generations, and on success measured in human rather than economic terms, is the best way to change this.”
“#COVID19 has exposed the lie that free markets can deliver healthcare for all, the fiction that unpaid care work isn’t work, the delusion that we live in a post-racist world,” the U.N. Twitter account posted in response to Guterres’s speech, adding that the coronavirus has revealed that free markets are a “lie.”
#COVID19 has exposed the lie that free markets can deliver healthcare for all, the fiction that unpaid care work isn’t work, the delusion that we live in a post-racist world.
— @antonioguterres in annual @NelsonMandela lecture on Saturday’s #MandelaDay https://t.co/d7CvMcGegm pic.twitter.com/dk9K5i1FTC
— United Nations (@UN) July 18, 2020
Guterres also posted a video on his personal Twitter account warning that the coronavirus has exposed that the world is at a “breaking point” and must shift toward a more globalized structure going forward, arguing that “we belong to each other.”
#COVID19 has been likened to an x-ray, revealing fractures in the fragile skeleton of the societies we have built.
It has reinforced the need for solidarity more strongly than ever.
We belong to each other.
We stand together, or we fall apart.https://t.co/9wNIjgHSuX pic.twitter.com/XLJ5CFqZDo
— António Guterres (@antonioguterres) July 19, 2020
The call for more redistribution of wealth via a new global governance model comes as over 15 million people are suspected to have contracted the coronavirus to go along with more than 620,000 deaths, according to Worldometers.
