"World" editorial. The stakes in the primary elections for the American Democratic Party, which opens Monday February 3 with the traditional Iowa caucus, go far beyond the question of the candidates' personalities and their political differences this year. The one or eleven contenders who will be chosen, at the end of this process, to claim the Democratic nomination in the presidential election of November 3 will indeed bear a heavy responsibility: blocking the way for a second term of Donald Trump .
This responsibility does not stop at the borders of the United States. The past week alone has summed up the risks to the rest of the world from four more years of Trumpism in the White House. The more than likely failure of the procedure to remove the President from the Senate has shown the strength of Mr. Trump's grip on the Republican Party, while the procedure has revealed how far the President is ready to go – coin l aid of the United States to a foreign country, Ukraine, against the opening of an investigation into its political adversary – to stay in power.
The aftermath of Hillary Clinton's failure
The presentation on January 28 of the "Vision" of Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, provided another example of the harmfulness of the administration's foreign policy: this plan, drawn up in perfect harmony with the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu , flouts all the rules of international law.
Who can beat Donald Trump in November? The question poses a real dilemma for the Democratic Party, which will have to choose between reason and ideal. Because the evolution of the political line of democratic activists is not necessarily in step with that of the American electorate as a whole. Aftermath of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential failure, the party has slipped to the left for three years.
The themes around which the candidates for the primaries are gathering today, with varying fervor, and which enabled the Democrats to win the mid-term elections to the Congress in 2018, are those of fairer taxation, a more extensive health coverage, a higher federal minimum wage, and a return to more multilateralist treatment of global affairs. The rising stars of the Democratic Party in Congress are young women who are not afraid to display their radicalism. Opposite, Donald Trump is campaigning on identity themes and the good performance of the economy.
The final arbiter is not the popular vote
Of the four candidates who stand out at the start of the primary race, Senator Bernie Sanders is the one who embodies the most radical line. Former vice-president Joe Biden, who was Barack Obama's teammate for eight years, represents the centrist movement. Social Left advocate Senator Elizabeth Warren could potentially bridge the two, as could Pete Buttigieg, former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, the youngest of the four.
Messrs. Sanders and Biden are in the lead right now. In the American system, however, the final arbiter is not the popular vote but the electoral college, which weighed in favor of Donald Trump in 2016. This factor tends to favor Joe Biden, 77: a safe bet, but which hardly inspires the partisans of an in-depth renewal of the Democratic Party. These primaries will in any case have very attentive observers on the other side of the Atlantic.
