The fourth annual Global Leadership Forum event, organised by FIDIC, got underway in Athens on 16 April 2026 with around 100 of the world’s infrastructure leaders coming together to discuss and collaborate to address some of the key challenges facing the industry and the world.
Opening the event, which was sponsored this year by Bentley Systems (platinum sponsor) and Autodesk (gold sponsor), FIDIC’s CEO Susanna Zammataro (pictured above, bottom centre), said that she was excited to be hosting such an important gathering which provided a unique opportunity to discuss some of the key challenges facing everyone in the room but also importantly the real opportunities for the industry.
FIDIC president Alfredo Ingletti (pictured above, bottom right) highlighted the key role of engineers in the infrastructure industry and the importance of FIDIC’s role in bringing leaders together. “The first priority of infrastructure is to connect people and to improve their quality of life,” he said. “After all, infrastructure is what nature cannot do - it changes the way that we live. Within that, FIDIC has never been more essential to provide a common platform for the industry’s leaders to gather at events like this and engineer a bright future together,” said Ingletti.
Bill Cox, chair of the Global Leadership Forum advisory board (pictured above, top right), said that the concept of permacrisis was more relevant than ever given current world events. He acknowledged the efforts of those present to attend an event like this in times of turbulence and volatility. “It’s often too easy to say that you don’t have time or that it will not matter – it does!”
Cox highlighted the role of the Global Leadership Forum and what it seeks to do. “It does what it says on the tin – we bring together the top leaders globally to share ideas, challenge each other, come away with new perspectives and approaches as well as new partnerships and ideas,” he said. “This forum also recognises the unique role that leaders have, which is often lonely, unforgiving, requiring courage, integrity, resilience and the ability to say no when the easy answer is yes, and, conversely, the strength to say yes when no is the easy out,” Cox said.
Welcoming attendees to his country, Christos Dimas, the minister of infrastructure and transport of the Government of the Hellenic Republic (pictured above, top centre), said that Greece had been implementing a network of new infrastructure to help develop the country’s role as a key international strategic transport hub, connecting regional networks with global value chains. Significant investments had been made, the minister said, and infrastructure was at the core of his country’s ambitious plans.
The minister outlined some of the key projects being driven by the Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport. These included the Central Greece motorway, the extension of the Thessaloniki metro, the construction of Line 4 of the Athens metro and a number of key rail network projects around the country. “My country and my department is well aware of the importance of sound planning and design and so the expertise of engineers and the work of FIDIC’s membership is very important to what we are trying to achieve,” the minister said. “The same applies to renovations of schools and hospitals where the expertise of consultancy firms is absolutely vital along with the promotion of new production and working methods,” Dimas said.
Keynote speaker Lech Wałęsa (pictured above left), the former president of Poland and a Nobel Prize Laureate, highlighted the concept of what happens when old institutions and established ways of doing things become obsolete. “In Poland, we saw that the current arrangements that we were facing gave no prospect of reform, so they had to be changed. We said that we needed to find peaceful arguments and strategies to make change and we destroyed an old order to build something new,” Wałęsa said. It was important to remember and learn from the lessons of the past. “Everything that we do in the world today has to face up to what we have done before, including the mistakes that have been made – especially the political ones,” he said.
He said that all the larger nations of the world were formed by conquering smaller ones. Russia incorporated 60 nations by force. The US had to have a civil war to be become united. “Now we need to make a new paradigm and figure out what needs to be done on a continental and a global scale not just a national one. We are in less and less control of what is going on. Three countries want to form a unipolar world – the US, Russia and China. If Russia conquers Ukraine, it will become a leader of a uni-polar world. Meanwhile the US is eying up Greenland and of course China has ambitions too,” said Wałęsa.
Wałęsa praised the impact of the work of the infrastructure sector. “Your industry has a key role to play in the world because the work that you do changes that world and politicians could not do without it. Your best solutions to address and solve the world’s problems can change our world, but of course, the same politicians can wreck your best plans,” he said. That was why people who were skilled in figuring out technical and practical solutions should get involved in politics, he said, urging his audience to engage more directly with the political process in their countries.
He told his audience: “Successful people like you don’t want to get involved in politics and that means that we get the politicians we currently have, like the populists who don’t have solutions and answers to the challenges and problems facing the world. We need the people who know how to build to help us build the better world we want to see,” he said. Referring to FIDIC’s call to engineer a bright future together, Wałęsa said: “Being together is important, especially when we have something to ‘be together’ about.”
