The world goes to the polls

Speakers

• Zanny Minton Beddoes

  Editor-in-chief

  Zanny Minton Beddoes is the editor-in-chief of The Economist. Prior to this role, she was the economics editor, overseeing the global economics coverage. Ms Minton Beddoes has written extensively about international financial issues, including the enlargement of the European Union, the future of the International Monetary Fund and economic reform in emerging economies. She has published in Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy, contributed chapters to several conference volumes and, in 1997, edited “Emerging Asia”, a book on the future of emerging markets in Asia. In May 1998, she testified before Congress on the introduction of the euro.
• Idrees Khaloon

  Washington bureau chief

  Idrees Kahloon leads The Economist’s coverage of the White House, Congress and national politics. Prior to that, he was the Washington correspondent and focused on policy matters. He began at The Economist as a data journalist in London. He graduated from Harvard University with a degree in applied mathematics and economics.
• Sophie Pedder

  Paris bureau chief

  Sophie Pedder covers French politics and economics. She joined The Economist in 1990 and has reported on Britain, European politics, the media industry, and the end of apartheid in South Africa as the Johannesburg correspondent in the 1990s. Earlier, she was a research assistant for William Julius Wilson at the University of Chicago’s Urban Poverty and Family Life project. She is the author of “Revolution Française: Emmanuel Macron and the Quest to Reinvent a Nation” (Bloomsbury, 2018), and “Le déni français” (JC Lattès, 2012). A graduate of Oxford University and the University of Chicago, she won the David Watt journalism prize in 2006.
• David Rennie

  Geopolitics editor

  David Rennie writes about geopolitics and co-hosts the Drum Tower podcast on China. Since he joined The Economist in 2007, he has worked as a columnist in Brussels, London, Washington and Beijing, where he was bureau chief from 2018 to 2024. Previously, he was a foreign correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, a contributing editor of the Spectator magazine and a reporter for the Evening Standard. He has won several awards, most recently the 2023 Osborn Elliott Prize for Excellence in Journalism on Asia, shared with his Drum Tower co-host, Sue-Lin Wong.