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What Presidents & Politicians Are Like in Real Life

Jakub Ferencik
5 min readAug 15, 2022

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In June 2022, I had the wonderful pleasure to intern at the GLOBSEC conference in Bratislava, Slovakia, where 5 Presidents, 10 Prime Ministers, and countless delegates met to discuss security concerns in Europe.

The main purpose of the conference was to mobilize support for Ukraine. I hope and believe that this conference achieved that aspiration.

I had the pleasure of meeting many ambitious and equally kind individuals who are ready to tackle the problems of the European Union and beyond. And I wanted to briefly reflect on the experience here for those who read my blogs and articles.

Photo by Christian Lue on Unsplash

The Slovakian President, Zuzana Caputova

To start, the Slovakian President, Zuzana Caputova, opened with some remarks. She’s very charming in person. And her eloquence beats that of most world leaders I am familiar with.

She stressed that, if we are to stand up to these challenges, we must build resilience, and be in this fight for the long term.

“Now we realize that peace and freedom are not free,” she claimed. Elsewhere, she was highly critical of a pacifist stance toward Russia. In her words:

“Our packages of medicine and food will not drive out your occupiers. Your defenders need military…

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Jakub Ferencik
Jakub Ferencik

Written by Jakub Ferencik

Journalist living in Prague | Author of “Up in the Air” and “Beyond Reason” on AMAZON | MA McGill Uni | 750+ articles with 1+ mil. views

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