On October 30, fifteen diplomats in New York voted in secret for the seventh time. The question was who will lead the United Nations from January 1, 2027. Rebeca Grynspan of Costa Rica received eleven votes of encouragement. Rafael Grossi of Argentina received nine, Carolyn Rodrigues Birkett of Guyana eight.
In the end, the winner needs at least nine votes. In addition, none of the five veto powers may object. Two weeks earlier, the veto powers had cast their votes on colored ballots. Each of the three front-runners received two rejections from that circle. This time the ballots were uniform again. Nobody outside the room therefore knows whether one of the three will fall to a veto.
I follow this process with respect. It is laborious. It is secret. Yet for eighty years it has produced, every time, a person the world could agree on. At the same time, it captures in a single image what this brief is about. Eight billion people receive a shared leader over whom fifteen states deliberate. Five of them can strike any name.
Two Years After #17
In August 2024, in issue #17, I set democracy and autocracy side by side. I asked how democracy could be reformed to become the best system for peace, prosperity, freedom and justice. That text is being read again right now. I am glad about that. It also challenges me to measure it against this year.
Back then, the starting point was the image of two systems facing each other. In 2026 that image no longer holds on its own. The dividing line now runs through states as much as between them. Where states collide, almost no one corrects them anymore.
This year has delivered clear examples. On January 3, American forces seized Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. His regime largely stayed in power under Delcy Rodríguez. On February 28, the United States and Israel attacked Iran. A ceasefire followed only in April. The war in Ukraine is in its fifth year. Talks between Kyiv, Moscow and Washington have been frozen since February.
One can consider each of these decisions right or wrong. What they share is something else. Between states in 2026, correction comes through pressure, through force, or not at all.
This leads to the question of this brief. Who actually corrects the world?
Three Measurements, Three Findings
Anyone who wants to know the state of political order turns to the major indices. This year they contradict each other.
Freedom House counts the twentieth consecutive year with more declines than gains. Political rights and civil liberties declined in 54 countries. They improved in 35. Only 21 percent of people now live in countries the organization rates as free. Twenty years ago it was 46 percent.
The V-Dem Institute in Gothenburg paints an even harsher picture. It counts almost three quarters of the world's population, around six billion people, as living in autocracies. By its measure, 44 countries are autocratizing. For the first time in more than fifty years, V-Dem no longer classifies the United States as a liberal democracy. Italy and the United Kingdom also appear on its list of countries with new decline. Critics accuse the institute of political bias.
The Economist Intelligence Unit, by contrast, sees stabilization after eight years of decline. In its count, the number of full and flawed democracies rose from 77 to 80. Yet it, too, names the United States as a clear exception.
I consider this contradiction itself the most important finding. The world has no shared instrument for measuring the state of its own order. Each institute measures honestly. Each measures something different. An order that cannot take its temperature in a common way notices its fever late.
Where Correction Still Works
Reading a general decline into these numbers would be wrong. Within many states, correction continues to work.
South Korea removed a president from office. Its citizens then elected a new one early. According to the Pew Research Center, 61 percent there are now satisfied with their democracy. In Japan, that figure rose within a single year from 24 to 44 percent. Freedom House lists Poland, Brazil and Senegal as countries that have recovered. V-Dem upgrades Guyana, Mongolia and Nigeria to democracies.
In the United States, too, such a test is coming on November 3. The congressional elections will show how well the mechanisms of correction work there. Staffan Lindberg, director of V-Dem, calls them a critical test. I do not read that as taking sides. Every democracy must pass this test regularly. That is exactly what makes it a democracy.
What People Want
A common narrative says people have had enough of democracy. The surveys show something else.
Dissatisfaction is high. In the United States, 69 percent are dissatisfied with how their democracy works. In Sweden, by contrast, 76 percent are satisfied. But dissatisfaction does not mean rejection. In a 2017 Pew Research Center survey across 38 countries, rule by a strong leader without parliament or courts drew a median of only 26 percent support. Military rule reached 24 percent. Direct democracy, in which citizens vote on major questions themselves, was supported by 66 percent.
There are exceptions. In India, 67 percent consider a strong leader a good form of government. That belongs to the honest picture. The overall picture is still clear. Most people do not want less say. They want more.
Here lies the real gap of our time. The order people want gives them more weight. The order they experience concentrates decisions in fewer and fewer hands. No index measures this distance as a quantity of its own. Yet it explains much of what the indices measure.
How Correction Actually Happens
In 1970, the economist Albert O. Hirschman described how organizations learn. He named two paths. People can leave. They can also speak up. A company notices from falling sales that something is wrong. A government notices it from lost elections, from rulings of its courts, from citizens and capital leaving the country.
Both paths share a precondition. There must be a counterweight that those in power cannot ignore. It can be an opposition that wins the next election. It can be a court whose ruling stands. It can be a neighboring state where life is better. Locally, this competition ensures that those in power listen or leave.
This is where this brief goes beyond #17. Democracy and autocracy differ less in how they decide. They differ in whether a mistake has consequences for the one who makes it.
The World Has No Counterweight
The world as a whole can neither vote out nor move away. There is no election in which eight billion people could replace a leadership. The International Court of Justice issues rulings. It cannot enforce them. And where would anyone go? There is only one Earth.
Meanwhile, power is reordering itself. The American National Security Strategy of November 2025 itself proclaimed a multipolar world. Many analysts see something closer to a team of two or three powers: the United States, China, perhaps Russia. Such a team does not correct itself. It negotiates among its members. The other states watch.
In the long run, a true counterweight could emerge. A second settled world would be the first place to which a society could actually move. I described in #166 what that means for the bond between the two worlds. For the coming decades, this outlook does not help. Correction has to be built on this planet.
The office that comes closest to a counterweight is that of the UN Secretary-General. It speaks for all states. It belongs to none. Yet the selection follows a logic that weakens the office. Anyone who wants the top job must never have seriously opposed a veto power beforehand. Anyone who wants to be reappointed cannot do so in office either. So the office that could correct the states is filled by exactly the states it is meant to correct.
Building Correction Without Competition
Where no counterweight arises on its own, listening has to be built in. I am convinced that the world needs a strong intergovernmental institution for this. Strong does not mean large. Strong means: with a legitimacy of its own.
The first lever is the top of the United Nations. A single seven-year term without reappointment would free the person at the top from a second campaign. They could speak without watching for the next approval from the veto powers. This goes together with a Security Council that presents the General Assembly with more than one name. The assembly of all states would then truly choose instead of merely confirming. Since 2016, candidates have presented themselves in public. These hearings should carry weight, for example through an open indicative vote in the General Assembly before the Council decides.
A strengthened leadership needs a voice from below that it cannot pass over. I propose a standing world citizens' assembly, selected by lot from every region of the Earth. Its recommendations would not be binding. The response to them would be. Every government a recommendation addresses would have to state publicly, within a fixed deadline, whether it follows it. If it does not, it must explain why. In this way, dissent becomes something a government has to answer.
So that this assembly knows what it is talking about, the world needs a shared instrument for measuring the state of its order. Today, Freedom House, V-Dem and the Economist Intelligence Unit measure side by side. A jointly owned report with open data would not end the dispute. It would put the dispute on the same foundation.
For decisions whose consequences outlast decades, there must be a voice for those not yet born. A chamber for future generations could examine projects that place a disproportionate burden on later people. It could forbid nothing. It could force a second reading.
Above all of this stands a principle that already works in smaller communities. Decisions are made as close to the ground as possible. Only what cannot be solved below moves upward. A world order that draws everything to itself would be a new form of concentration. It should carry only what no state can carry alone.
The Election as a Beginning
In the coming weeks, the Security Council will probably agree on a name. I wish the person who takes office on January 1, 2027 every strength. They will enter a world whose order is rearranging itself. No one will be able to vote them out. Only a few will have voted them in.
Whether this office becomes a true voice of the world does not depend on the person. It depends on whether the states change the procedure for next time. The time for that begins with this election.
Even a world without a counterweight will be corrected eventually. Without a procedure, that happens through a rupture. I would rather have the procedure.
| The Planet Futures Organization, the first multiplanetary NGO.
Homepage: https://planet-futures.org