this is bbc news. the headlines: the first crude mission by a private company to the international space station has safely returned to earth. the spacex dragon crew shall off the coast of florida. thus‘s administrators say emission‘s success month beginning of a new era in human space flight. one of president trump's top medical advisers has warned that the us is entering a new phase in its fight against the coronavirus pandemic. deborah birx said the disease was "extraordinarily widespread", and a greater threat than when the outbreak first began. an investigation by the bbc‘s persian service has found that the number of people who have died with covid—i9 in iran is nearly three times higher than the government has admitted.

now on bbc news, audiences from around the world question their leaders on global issues. hello, and welcome to london for this edition of global questions with me, zeinab badawi. has coronavirus changed our view of what we expect from our leaders? uncertainty still grips many nations and people are looking critically at how politicians have responded to the pandemic. will this usher in a new social contract between citizens and governments and help reframe the role of the state? that's coronavirus crisis: will it change our politics?

james graham is here. his first big success in 2012 with this house. well, i'm now inside the bbc‘s headquarters here in central london and as always to bring you this edition of global questions our two panelists, and our audience members join us via video link. let me tell you who is in the hot seat this week. james graham is an acclaimed british dramatist and playwright. political discourse has been central to his work since his first big success in 2012 with this house which was a critical insight into the workings of british politics.

and lysa john is secretary—general of civicus, lysa has spent more than 20 years working on grassroots advocacy including social justice, human rights, and poverty. great line—up, welcome to you both, and also to my audience members. and remember you too canjoin the conversation at... solitary round of applause for me to you all. now, let's get through our first question straightaway and it is from borneo in malaysia and dylanjordan tan. dyla n. hi there. so, with the current health crisis that we are in, unemployment and hunger have increased. so how do world leaders regain the trust of the people? how do world leaders regain the trust of the people? before you answer that both of you, james, have world leaders lost the trust of their people? i think a great many of them have. of course, it's not uniform, every different country has a different relationship with its populace. but i don't think we can pretend that prior to this global outbreak of this pandemic that the relationship and the contract between citizen and state, certainly in a lot of western democracies felt particularly healthy. speaking to you now from great britain, i think we had really felt we had arrived at a crossroads

after the financial crisis of 2008, after the deep divisions of brexit and including up to the proroguing of our parliament in 2019. it really felt like ideologically, domestically, politically, economically, intellectually, we had reached a tipping point. and of course there's nothing like a virus, a global pandemic to demand that you have to reset certain imbalances within that relationship between citizen and state. lysa john, do you agree with james that governments have lost the trust of their people and therefore, they have to regain it and if so, what do they do? i would love to agree with him but evidence actually shows otherwise.

so, you saw that the edelman barometer of trust data earlier in may showed us that people are in fact now providing very heavily on governments to do the right thing, so trust in governments increased this year but it has to be followed up by some bold and decisive action, and that's where i think the crux lies and the ability of people to continue to trust their governments will depend on whether they actually take on the decisive and transformative changes that people want to see from their governments. there is again reports from established global think tanks for this being the one moment in time where we have unprecedented high levels of public expectation from governments to do the right thing. so to really change what responses have been so far, particularly in tackling inequality and climate change. all right, let's to just outside durban in south africa to our next question from caitlin michael, caitlin.

hi, my question is pretty simple, it's with regard to female leaders and how well they've handled the pandemic and whether being a female leader and being selected in female leader is actually a sign of progression of the society as a whole which has then in turn helped the ease of the pandemic in those countries. right, lysa john, you've got a smile on your face. is it going to broaden? because you agree with that, that women have done it better throughout this coronavirus crisis. absolutely and of course, caitlin is in durban, i'm injohannesburg, so i'm going to agree with her. i think there two trends here. one of course, we have seen huge attention in the media at what women leaders at the global level are doing well. so, whether it's germany or new zealand or taiwan, you are seeing women heads of state responding differently to the crisis than particularly their proletarian counterparts. and i think what this really means in relation to how governments responsd is a move and a demand for less of the aggressive masculine pendency of win and lose, domination and aggression,

and more of the feminist principle of leadership where you're not only listening to diverse views but you are actually engaging with dissent and therefore able to create more resilient and adaptive ways of responding to an unprecedented context. so, james, do you think then that voters and people are picking up on this kind of more caring, emotional intelligence aspect that lysa says women leaders have? well, i hope they're picking up on it because it's impossible to deny. statistically, you cannot escape how effective different 0k countries and different leaders have been in tackling the coronavirus. and it mayjust be that there are certain kinds of men

in traditional western democracies who tend to rise to the top, particularly at this moment. we are coming out of a moment where populism was raging through europe and america where a certain kind of libertarian masculine leader who often tried to sell very popular and actually quite aggressively simple messages were those who people responded to because they felt like they were anti—politics. they were not traditionally seen as politicians with a great level of expertise or who had worked in the establishment and had been embedded in the system. whether that be borisjohnson who was a journalist and someone say a television personality, or donald trump who was a reality television star. they were elected, we are told, because they were anti—politics and they were presenting these quite clear but very simple narratives and then into this comes a very complicated problem that requires a very complicated solution. and the evidence speaks for itself whether you look at jacinda ardern in new zealand or angela merkel in germany, who has a background and scientific data analysis, they acknowledged the complexity of this problem and weren't afraid to take unpopular decisions that in the long run

benefited their country. but aren't you being a little bit tough? i mean, men can be compassionate and caring, and some have really put their best foot forward, haven't they? i'm a bloke and i'd like to think i'm incredibly intune with my emotional side, not because i'm a playwright. and of course these are vast generalisations. ijust think we are coming out of a particular cultural moment where strength was perceived in politics to be a certain kind of, as you identified, a certain kind of masculinity where changing your mind or for a second admitting that things were complicated and are going to be difficult was not the prominent political characteristic that we had

in our leaders and it's exactly the moment where we needed that kind of binary, non—simplistic naive and grey thinking. caitlin, what do you think about what you had just heard both our panelists say? i agree with everything everyone is saying and i feel like also this idea of a softer side be more feminine or masculine and just this continual binary view of characteristics which i think we should start stepping away from but what i was really interested in is whether that's actually a reflection of the society and how that society, how the woman leaders have been chosen and, whether it is a reflection more on the societies. all right, thank you very much indeed. now, let's go to east africa and uganda to bidi. bidi, to your question, please. yeah. some governments are using covid—19 to crackdown on dissenting voices in their country and therefore, this has emboldened the dictatorships of ruthless rulers. all right, so james graham, this has strengthened the hands then and emboldened the strongmen in government? has t?

interesting considering the last question and the difference between the approach of certain governments. it can be no question that in a crisis the inclination of some governments towards using this as an opportunity to increase the powers or leaning towards more authoritarian response of government over their people has always been the case historically speaking. there is a spectrum of that, i'm not comparing the response of the uk to what we just heard but the passage of legislation through the british parliament in terms of increased powers for the government to be able to respond to the crisis and also whether it be issues around data and surveillance needed by our health organisations and our bodies need in terms of tracking, tracing and monitoring us, there has been a significant lack of scrutiny understandably given the urgency of the response but across—the—board i think it is not uncommon to see normal standards of scrutiny she and checks and balances slightly disappeared. it is obligated on citizens

and you as a journalist and members of our pariliaments and governments to make sure that once the extremities of this crisis ebb away slightly that those checks and balances return and hold oui’ governments more to account. lysa john. the trend really of using the pandemic as an excuse to restrict civic freedoms is really worrying. all the directions and evidence really is of governments not just enforcing temporary measures but finding ways to make the dilution of democratic systems more permanent. a lot ofjournalists are not being allowed to ask questions and countries, citizens are being punished for speaking out on social media or questioning the methods

of government measurement. the attacks on civil rights defenders and journalists have increased exponentially. being a journalist now is one of the most dangerous professions in the world as it was in previous years where we tracked civic freedoms and i will end with one more fact. in over 68 countries around the world this year, governments have postponed elections that were due to happen at national or subnational levels and that means we really urgently as citizens need more substantive ways engaging with governments rather than just the exercise of our vote. this has to be a moment in time where we're also reinventing how democracies work and how

we are able to then reinforce the kind of collective good that publics need from governments. let us now go to brazil and andre 0livera. hello, i would ask if they think that free market has weakened the comparative ties of our societies and has made politics more selfish? something that that coronavirus pandemic has highlighted. james, how would you answer that? that is a really good and important question. certainly in the first instance temporarily by default governments had to put back—up borders and cease engagement in a physical sense and a diplomatic sense and changing how we operate and i think psychologically it does feel like a natural extension of a trend that we are seeing borders being rebuilt literally and discussions being rebuilt between nations and a sense of certain governments, in certainly donald trump's administration in engendering or trying to engender distrust and mistrust in our global bodies and global expertise. i think naturally, there is something about the nature of a global pandemic and the speed with which it travels and the universal way that it travels that i think

is forcing a new culture and governments to see themselves as part of a global society that will require huge and ambitious and transformative global solutions notjust in rebuilding the global economy post—pandemic but also the challenges we all face as a world. the climate crisis that has so dominated our discourse and our headlines and protest movements in 2019 has not gone away, it's been exacerbated. we need to come together with global positions to find ambitious solutions. lysa, has politics become more selfish and inward looking? i think it has in the past decades and there is a clear nexus between how politics and business have operated. there has been a report by a special rapporeur of the human rights council recently which pointed to three trends that have grown exponentially since the 1980s. one is regressive

tax avoidance. the second is the deregulation of labour markets and the third is the privatisation of public services and all of these three have been combined to put us in the situation we are in now where we are not only dealing with and extort new health crisis but we are also doing with a crisis of employment, social protection, and a crisis of inequality that is coming up to the fore across countries. and i think that really calls again for us to be examining very clearly how our economic and political systems are unfit for purpose of the moment and need to be redesigned with a much stronger gravel of accountability and oversight from citizens. you are living in brazil and of course president bolsonaro has attracted a great deal of attention because after you the united states brazil is the country most affected by covid—19. are you seeing a more selfish politics as you put it there?

yes. here in brazil, we are living in, as everybody knows, a country without any kind of leadership during the pandemic. each state of the country has adopted politics to face it. so it is everything very uncoordinated around the country and it makes the situation even worse. so, it's something like the president has said, "you do whatever you want, i have no responsibility over anything." each to his own is what you say is going on in brazil. thanks very much indeed for that perspective. let's now go to the capital of sweden, stockholm, and layla. thank you, my question is what kind of policies or change in politics do

you think are needed after going through a pandemic that aren't proportionately affected working—class people as well as people of colour both health—wise as well as financially? lysa john. there is this urgent sense of desperation of being left behind by our economic systems that you raise across the world. we know that 70 million people will be pushed into extreme poverty with a large portion of them from the african continent and is causing more business and governments to step up and provide the kind of leadership the world really needs right now.