The ManicaPost
President Barack Obama, speaking in the birthplace of democracy, has talked of the importance of respecting the choice of the people only days after the election of Donald Trump and said, ‘The future will be OK’.
The audience in the Greek capital, Athens, laughed when the outgoing president said: “People should be free to choose their own leaders – even if your candidate doesn’t always win.”
But he was making a serious point and added: “Progress follows a winding path, sometimes forwards sometimes back, but as long as we retain our faith in democracy, our faith in the people, then our future will be OK.”
He admitted he and the President-Elect ‘could not be more different’ but he assured Americans he would work with Trump’s team in the coming weeks to ensure a smooth handover of power, adding: “That’s how democracy has to work.”
Obama, who is on the first leg of his final foreign tour as president today, said: “Democracy, like all human institutions, is imperfect.
“It can be slow, it can be frustrating, it can be messy.
“Politicians are often unpopular, that is because you don’t get 100 per cent of what you want.”
In a possibly veiled piece of advice for President-Elect Trump, Obama said: “Democracy requires compromise.”
He said if people feel they are losing out they will ‘push back’ and he said this had happened in elections in Greece, in the United States and in Britain with the Brexit vote.
Obama said, “History does not move in a straight line,” and he quoted Dr Martin Luther King when he said: “The arc of the moral universe is long but it is bent towards justice.”
He said: “Progress is never guaranteed. Progress has to be earned by every generation. But I believe history gives us hope.”
Obama also made a mark of rebuffing his successor’s well-known coolness on the subject of the North Atlantic Treaty and the obligation to defend each Nato member from aggression.
He said: “In recent years we’ve made historic investments in Nato, increased America’s presence in Europe.
“And today’s Nato, the world’s greatest alliance, is as strong and as ready as it’s ever been.
“And I am confident that just as America’s commitment to the transatlantic alliance has endured for seven decades, whether it’s been under a Democratic or Republican administration, that commitment will continue, including our pledge and our treaty obligation to defend every ally.”
Obama, who is leaving the White House after eight years in power, was cheered by the audience at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center as he pronounced the Greek word ‘demokratia’, which the word democracy is based on. – Daily Mail.
