The spectre of Donald Trump is haunting the world’s elites as they prepare to gather in Davos.
The Swiss ski resort will next week be alive with the sound of clinking champagne flutes and chin-wagging billionaires attending the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF).
But away from the frenzied backslapping and behind the tinted windows of SUVs choking the town’s streets, all is not well.
A survey published yesterday by the WEF ahead of the meeting revealed that 88 per cent of global leaders and experts think the next couple of years will be either ‘stormy’, ‘turbulent’ or ‘unsettled’ – with worse to come over the longer term.
That is even more pessimistic than the same poll’s notably gloomy outlook a year ago. And the poll was conducted before the election of Trump in November – a result that will have made the typical Davos mover and shaker even more worried.
The start of Trump’s second term will overshadow the week in Davos.
He will be inaugurated on Monday and, three days later, the President – who has twice before appeared at Davos in person – will address delegates virtually in what is almost certain to prove the summit’s key event.
And his return to the White House signals that disruption created by his first term will be no blip.
From free trade and climate change to defence spending and the future of Ukraine, the common principals, ambitions and assumptions of Western leaders are being overturned.
The message to the political and business leaders gathering at Davos seems to be: get used to it.
Trump’s tariff threats have raised fears of a damaging global trade war that will hurt growth. Yet even in Davos there is the acknowledgement that there were plenty of positives for business during his first term.
‘Global trade grew, investments grew, the economy grew,’ said WEF chief executive Borge Brende earlier this week.
Brende has taken over from Klaus Schwab, who stepped down after five decades in charge of Davos.
Brende remains wary of the disruption ahead. He said: ‘We will, of course, face a different trade landscape than before. Trade should continue to flow – what we have to avoid is a fragmentation that leads to a decoupling.’
A major breakdown in trade could lead to a ‘depression that has to be avoided’, said Brende.
He admitted that the consensus that has existed for more than three decades is crumbling.
‘It is a reality that we are in the middle of two orders,’ he said.
‘We had one order post-Cold War and then now it’s an unruly time because we don’t exactly know what the new order will be.’
Davos is already changing. Back in 2019, teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg was feted by delegates as she warned: ‘Our house is on fire.’
Last year, however, it was Argentinian president Javier Milei who thrilled the meeting with his robust defence of capitalists as ‘heroes’, firm rejection of socialism and rallying cry of ‘long live freedom, dammit’.
Milei returns this year, though some Davos regulars are likely to be less comfortable about his views on feminism, abortion and environmentalism.
Also appearing will be Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, though the hope for victory over Russia that greeted his debut at Davos in 2023 has faded as the war grinds grimly on – and Trump’s ambivalence about the conflict sets off alarm bells.
Trump was the ghost at the feast of yesterday’s Global Risks Report, compiled from a poll of 900 respondents in September and October.
The top threats they identified for the year ahead were war, misinformation and the environment.
Yet there was no mention of Trump, whose leadership will doubtless have a major impact on all three, as WEF managing director Mirek Dusek unveiled the findings yesterday.
The report also suggested that economic risks such as inflation had diminished – again, a picture that has been dramatically altered by Trump’s election as his threatened tariffs would push up prices.
Those fears have been making major waves in bond markets this year, pushing up UK borrowing costs and making a wreck of Labour’s growth agenda. That will make it an uncomfortable meeting for Chancellor Rachel Reeves.
Since attending last year’s meeting while in opposition she has destroyed her party’s carefully-cultivated business-friendly image with a £25billion national insurance raid on employers.
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