The United States voted, President Joe Biden did not end up weakened and with the lame step and Donald Trump was “Furious and screaming”as her friends tell her CNN. This scenario is certainly different from what analysts predicted, but the result shouldn’t come as a surprise.
In Tuesday’s midterm elections, an exam that usually punishes the government, it ended up moderating very actively the centrist electorate itself which brought the Democrats to power two years ago. Now he has added forward constraints to that decision and at the same time reiterated what he did not want before and he does not want now.
There is no change in that dimension since the 2020 polls. This is perhaps the main fact that makes these elections extraordinary, that is, different.
Moderation
The voters handed over control of the influential Chamber of Deputies to the Republicans. However, they did it on such a narrow difference that it left the opposition with one of the weakest performance in history for the party out of power in these mid-term elections.
The same thing happened with the Senate, which remained in the balance, repeating, with the unknown state of Georgia, a scene of two years ago that then ended in a democratic victory. What can happen again now. There was also an infamous balance with the governorates. Such a vote almost tiptoe on the frosted glass of polarization.
That limited margin will force negotiations between the two forces. An architecture that is both significant and symbolic. Negotiation, its very mention, is dry ground the fundamentalists that Trump leads, the big loser of this event. The former president intervened in the campaign by supporting more than 300 candidates, most of whom deny Biden’s victory in 2020.
And he usually bet to deepen the crack, calling destroy the president, not just defeat him. On that trip he justified the violence and called “animal” to the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, even after an individual, accused of that hatred, attacked the husband of the legislator when he was looking for her to kill her with a hammer.
With this behavior Trump, contrary to what he intended, ended up lightening the burden on the president who had massively promised himself in reproach for the cost of living and other vices that are attributed to the administration and that have maintained the image of the president in the basement.
that formula of confrontation, quarrel and contrast that Trump built left Biden with the best election performance in two decades for a president in this mid-term election. This conclusion translates into the fact that, in the remaining two years of mandate, there will be no major legislative adventures.
Tied hands
The Republicans won with their hands tied. They will not be able to persecute the president, hold back his power on crucial issues such as support for Ukraine in the war launched by Russia or the fate of its environmental policies. There is also a message to the world about a predictable USA with the same agenda, perhaps even beyond Biden. All a fact that could reveal this election.
For the populist tycoon, who devoured the largest opposition party with its fanatical, nationalist rhetoric, it was inevitable to stumble on the same stone over and over again. The story of him, however, it will hardly end here. Even with these injuries, Trump is unlikely to abandon the 2024 race. Trouble awaits them.
These ballots left Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in a very solid run, a far right like the former president, but more educated and with a more detailed presentation. “A Trump with a brain ”, they defined him.
Fired or frustrated, or both, the former president avoided congratulating DeSantis. He did it only with Senator Marco Rubio who kept his seat. But he let fly a sentence of gangster tone which he dedicated to the governor: “If he wants to do it, he can do it (look for the presidency), but I’ll tell you things about him that won’t be very flattering. I know about him more than anyone else, perhaps more about his wife than he is. “
This petty testimony has at least the value of avoiding confusion. It summarizes an irrefutable North American reality of a fiercely divided country but with an electorate that is as best it can in the face of the abyss.
The novelty is this last observation. The same sectors that promoted fundamentalist, autocratic populist or rigidly far-right variants with fascist outlines, clearly not only in the US, begin to place limits on these deformations and for the same reasons that radicalized them first.
These masses, especially the middle class, all over the world, are victims of it 15 years of economic crisis since 2008 and with the worsening of the pandemic, which has shaken and in many cases blocked their chances of building a future.
It now begins to insinuate a turn from the antisystem that caused this social damage towards a demand for restraint which is explained by the fact that these distortions greater inequality, made the system precarious and sharpened survival. The political center is necessarily conservative due to these circumstances, which also explain its growth.
The recent presidential elections in Brazil have also been dominated by the middle sectors clinging to similar demands in a strongly divided country. They elevated former president Luis Inácio Lula da Silva to government with limitations, but establishing strong opposition with which he will be forced to negotiate.
There they also showed a rejection of outgoing President Jair Bolsonaro’s populist fundamentalism, who in every way mimicked Trump’s polarizing stunts.
Another illustrative chapter of scene changes is offered by Italy today. Prime Minister Georgia Meloni, post-Fascist, formerly an admirer of Mussolini and Vladimir Putinhe escaped from those summits to a point of notorious political prudence.
It did so by supporting the values of Italian power in building the European Union, in the importance of Rome’s presence in NATO and in repudiating Russia’s anarchist disaster in its war against Ukraine. It is possible to assume that this centrist movement feeds on the example of extraordinary failure of the nationalist Brexit experiment which has engulfed Britain in its worst crisis in half a century.
The decline of the Kingdom is also proof of the limits that adventures and their knights begin to find. The killing of Boris Johnson is part of these transformations. In the same quadrant there is also the retreat of the Vox extremists in Spain in favor of the Popular Party, a hard right but within the system, and with a liberal format.
As in the case of Brazil, these political shifts sometimes appear with contradictory effects but are equally visible in the Latin American space with classic social democratic or center-right shots. An example was provided by the recent referendum in Chile which rejected the new Constitution.
That text was written by a minority who gave it a content that was nothing short of disruptive, trying to upset the institutions, disarming the Senate and the Judiciary. The Chileans have massively discarded it. The political place chosen by that people was also clarified there.
As in much of the rest of the world, a call for calm arises from the street to the institutions, to avoid further jolts in the battered communal building. Like decrepitude with Trump or other populist national formats around the world, many beyond our borders, fundamentalist confinement would appear to be on the way to becoming mobile minorities.
It is a new phenomenon, at least in its multiplication, which takes it away from chance. It may be ephemeral, but not to be missed during your visit. European, Latin American and, at this time, US examples would indicate that something is sprouting not so quietly between the threatening walls of the cracks.
© Copyright Clarin 2022
Source: Clarin
