Opinions #27/24

The fact that 2024 would become the year of many important electoral contests was known. That there would be a concentration of votes within a few weeks in early summer was not. Nor was it possible to imagine the sensational impact of the results concentrated in a few days. We’ll talk later about the outcome of India’s election, the most massive election in world history, when nearly a billion voters were called to the polls, and with a result that was partly different than expected. And we’ll have an opportunity to comment on the ongoing challenge in Iran between conservatives and reformists, where the progressive candidate is leading after the first round over the one backed by the ayatollah. As well as on an own goal scored in England, where the Conservative Party, in power for decades, suffered the fifth consecutive collapse of its prime minister.

The power of facts forces us to focus on the direct and indirect effects of the European elections and the news coming out of the US election campaign. Macron’s sudden decision to take France to the polls three years early, after losing the race for seats in the European Parliament, comes at a dramatic time. In the first round of elections last Sunday, the president and his party are out of power but not yet destroyed. The right-wing Lepenists won as expected, but not by a large margin. Many combinations are still possible in the July 7 vote: an absolute majority for Le Pen – Bardella – Ciotti or a regrouping of the “republican front” that has always prevailed at key moments of the Fifth Republic. Massimo Nava’s analysis emphasizes this possibility and at the same time traces the profile that a radical right-wing government would give France, both domestically and in its international relations. Different views on support for Ukraine will also have an impact, with skepticism being equal on both the right and left. A few more days and we will know what will be the post-election caliber of Macron, for whom it cannot be taken for granted that much of the left, which generally got stronger in the first round, wants to offer a lifeline after seven years of bad relations.

The French effect is the first, surprisingly immediate, result of the European elections of June 8 and 9. The second is already looming in Germany, where the same result – the development of extremes, the weakening of the majority – has shaken Chancellor Scholz’s “traffic light coalition.” Unlike Macron, Scholz did not call for early elections that would lead to inevitable defeat. But in September there will be voting in important states, namely those where the AfD’s right-wing and Sarah Wagenknecht’s the left-wing show up in the polls as the parties with the most votes.

In America, it is true that there has been no voting yet, but it is as if the result of the presidential election has already been achieved. After the first televised debate on June 27, the Democratic Party fears it no longer has a certain candidate for the White House. Biden’s actions were disastrous. The worst premonitions about his physical and mental condition were confirmed: an elderly man, weary in his movements, incoherent in his reasoning. A man who no longer has the resources to run the country for another four years. The drama, deliberately ignored by the president’s inner circle, turned to panic, as Andrew Spannaus recounts, already within 90 minutes of a face-to-face meeting with Trump. The tycoon now appears to be moving forward with the wind in his sails, thanks in part to a Supreme Court decision that granted him partial immunity for his actions as president. Only three obscurities make The Donald’s horizon less bright: with Biden gone, how much more competitive can the new Democratic nominee be? What will the deep state have to do with it? And then: that Robert Kennedy Jr., whom Trump and Biden did everything they could to keep out of televised debates and whose support after the first debate of the candidates he was excluded from seems to be growing, from whom will he steal the most votes on the fateful election day of November 5?