No one hopes that Tuesday's elections in the United States will be a "festival of democracy." The important thing is that they are not his funeral.
The votes to renew the 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 35 of the 100 in the Senate – both bodies now in the hands of the Democrats – will determine in the first instance Joe Biden's room for maneuver in the second half of his first term: both to continue legislating and governing without resorting excessively to executive orders and vetoes as to appoint judges and senior officials who can obtain the approval of the Upper House.
The ruling party has little hope of retaining dominance in the House of Representatives and, in view of the latest polls, it also sees its now tight majority in the Senate in danger, today of 50 seats out of a hundred plus the qualified vote of Vice President Kamala Harris.
Biden thus exposes himself to having to deal with a difficult cohabitation between his own and the Republicans. A new stage in which he would retain the broad powers reserved for the leader in the US presidential system, but at the same time he would be continuously challenged by an opposition determined to subject him to continuous pressure and surveillance, as well as to legislate at will. against on numerous key issues.
So far, little news regarding a majority of US presidents who have received severe punitive votes in their mid-term elections.
But the exceptional circumstances that the country has been going through since Donald Trump refused to accept his defeat in the 2020 presidential elections, to immediately "orchestrate" an attempted coup against the peaceful transition in power through the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2020 –in the expression used by the investigative commission of the facts in Congress–, they change and aggravate everything.
The former president is not exactly alone in his anti-democratic pulse. He retains majority support among the conservative bases that, with hardly any resistance from some leaders of his party more attached to power than to principles, has allowed him to manage the Republican primary process practically at will.
The result is that most of the candidates of that party – at least 291 out of a total of 569 according to the most prudent count – are equally deniers of the result of the elections two years ago. And although the proportion seems scandalous, given the total absence of evidence of fraud, it is in line with the reality of the 60% of Republican voters who continue to believe in the so-called Trump Big Lie.
In October, The Washington Post asked candidates from both parties in 19 states whether they would accept the results of their midterm elections, win or lose. The 19 Democratic candidates answered yes, but among the other 12 Republicans they said no or refused to answer.
Hence, in a solemn speech urgently announced last Wednesday, President Biden urgently appealed to the unity of Americans to avoid "chaos" to which, in his opinion, the attitude of those Republicans leads who, on the path of Trump, “they are not going to commit to accepting the results of the elections.” Resistance that is "unprecedented, illegal and un-American," he said. Consequently, the ruler summoned his fellow citizens to do nothing less than "save democracy" with his vote on November 8.
Six days after that election day, Trump is summoned to testify before the commission investigating the assault on Capitol Hill. And that is also the date that the former president's advisers point to as the preferred one for his "very, very, very likely" announcement that he will run for the 2024 presidential elections, according to what he himself advanced with more emphasis than ever at his Thursday rally. in Sioux City, Iowa.
The launch of said candidacy for re-election would make the presentation of criminal charges against the former president especially compromising, either for his participation in the attempt on January 6, 2021, or for his maneuvers to falsify the result of the presidential elections, or for hiding documents top secret at home, or for defrauding the treasury from their companies.
In the context of such challenges from Trump and his people, and after two years of a current term marred by inflation, the Afghanistan exit fiasco and watered-down Democratic successes in Congress, the more than 150 million Americans who They will vote on Tuesday not only must they choose among the hundreds of candidates for the two Chambers and 36 governor positions, along with other lower positions; voters are also forced to choose between Biden's flawed stability and the threat to democracy that Trump and his candidates pose. An almost existential election... Unless the former president throws in the towel, or at least gives up running to return to the White House, and in this way the waters can return to the channels of a certain normality.
For now, the lack of signs of Trump backing down, the widespread fear of outbreaks of political violence such as the recent hammer attack on the husband of the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, and the apparent weakness of the Democrats and Republicans measures to contain the ultra tide of Trumpism do not augur great news.
The former president's supporters make plans, if his party wins both chambers, to launch an impeachment against Biden, turn into federal law the abortion ban already imposed in dozens of states under his control and restrict the Administration's social spending as much as possible, including the already meager endowments for public health.
As important as it is for the country's destiny, what happens on Tuesday could have a global impact. In the context of the strengthening of the extreme right and anti-democratic populism in the West, and with the United States still being the mirror in which half the world looks at itself, a resounding victory for Trump's Republicans would not only give wings to an allegedly coup-mongering former president but to all those that, in other latitudes of America or in Eastern and Southern Europe, question rights and advances arduously defended in recent decades. It is democracy itself, in this sense, that is at stake.
