When he announced on Sunday 1st In the evening of March in his former fiefdom of South Bend, a modest town in Indiana, that he ended his candidacy for the Democratic nomination, Pete Buttigieg was quickly interrupted by a slogan hammered by his sympathizers: "2024! 2024! 2024! " They weren't the only ones who saw this as more goodbye than goodbye. In one year, the youngest member of the electoral competition has done much more than familiarize a singular patronymic inherited from his Maltese origins: he has become a sure bet for the Democratic Party.
Coming from the middle class, having gone to the best universities, engaged in Afghanistan where he served in intelligence, Pete Buttigieg had a difficult political start in a state that is a bastion of the Republican Party. To the point that his declaration of candidacy for the presidential nomination, in March 2019, first aroused disbelief. Consistently, however, he made his way.
The first homosexual claimed to embark on such an enterprise, regularly supported by her husband Chasten, he never ceased to recall his religious roots in the Episcopalian Church, one of the most progressive of all. Only 37 years old when he entered the campaign, he aroused the interest of a more mature electorate, seduced by his clarity and moderation.
This ease allowed him to resist wear and tear, while more experienced candidates, whether governors or former governors, senators, began to give up from the fall. When Donald Trump struggled to find a derogatory nickname for him, as for other Democratic candidates, the President of the United States knocked in the air. "Alfred E. Neuman cannot become President of the United States", he assured. He was referring to the toothless adolescent character who appeared on the cover of the satirical magazine MAD from 1954. Cruelly for the president, the youngest member of the Democratic race admitted that he had to look for the reference on the Internet.
The surprise of the campaign
The young man with the sometimes too smooth speech at the beginning of the campaign knew how to be incisive over the months. When Joe Biden, exasperated by the comparison often made with the trajectory of the last Democratic president, judged that Pete Buttigieg was not Barack Obama, he immediately replied: " Joe Biden is absolutely right, but neither is he. Strongly attacked by Senators Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar during the debates, he always knew how to cope without dismounting.
