The world is better since Saturday

 "Anyway, the world is better since Saturday. Perfect, it will never be," wrote Macario Schettino a few days ago. And yes, that week that kept the world on tenterhooks is finally over. "The American citizens spoke loud and clear: Joe Biden is the new president of the United States. The Trump era is over. The world today is a slightly better place than it was yesterday," stressed the former Uruguayan foreign minister, Ernesto Talvi, in corroborating the fact, but also in expressing a feeling shared by many citizens around the world, especially those of us who value liberal democracy.  

In the days leading up to the election, Yale University professor Timothy Snyder presented a devastating analysis of the politics of grief exercised by the " sadopopulist " and tribal chief, Donald Trump, whose management or lack of management and deliberate denial caused many avoidable deaths. The coronavirus has killed more people-more than 200,000 dead-in the United States than any event that has put that country on the battlefield: "Every few days, we suffer the equivalent of 9/11," Snyder said. Julio Patán joined Snyder: "Populism is the defeat of rationality, the normalisation of nonsense [...] The nonsense is Donald Trump". "And Trump's management has been lamentable" on issues of great importance to the current US situation, specifically in "the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and its economic consequences". However, "Some of the accusations against Trump and his handling of the virus are exaggerated. For example, although the United States has the highest number of cases and the highest number of deaths, its mortality rate per million people is 13th in the world and it is higher in a number of important countries including Spain, Great Britain, Belgium, Brazil, Mexico, Peru, and Argentina. However, the patently absurd statements about the virus, his disregard for scientific evidence, and his refusal to mitigate the economic catastrophe that the pandemic has engendered should have been enough to ensure his overwhelming defeat and that his party was brought down along with him," writer David Rieff recently analysed.

Donald Trump, known and recognized for his contempt for citizens, his racism and stigmatization of immigrants and for being an admirer of autocrats and dictators, will leave power and that is good news. However, his electoral strength cannot be ignored. Speaking of the dangers of right-wing populism and the "triumph of hatred", Julio Patán warned that despite the disastrous management of the pandemic, Donald Trump's 70 million voters corroborate that "resentment is a living force" and that "authoritarianism is a box-office hit, especially when it is accompanied by heavy-handed rhetoric and overwhelming nationalism". It is worth emphasising: Trump's departure from the White House is good news. With Joe Biden, form, rationality and common sense will return. Even when his room for manoeuvre is not too wide, recovering some of what was lost with Trump is no small feat. The fact is that the United States does not emerge unscathed from this populist administration. Our society is divided and highly polarised, as was evidenced before, during and after the electoral process. David Rieff's lengthy analysis provides a better understanding of the internal situation and the social tension the United States is experiencing. In the eyes of Rieff, who offers a comparative perspective, Argentina's "crack" would appear less deep than that of the United States. Such a comparison may be a good indicator for approximating the political and social climate in the United States. In Argentina, Academician Constanza Mazzina noted that the US situation is very much like that of Latin America.  

"Biden will certainly restore a version of the pre-trump status quo, at least stylistically. He is a professional politician, a man of the Washington establishment who has been trying to become president for nearly four decades. And the election of Kamala Harris, although she stands to Biden's right on many social issues, is immensely important symbolically in times of enormous racial tension and stress, especially because of her mixed African-American and South Asian lineage. But the challenges facing Biden and Harris are more than overwhelming and will have to be met with a hostile Senate and a weakened House of Representatives, while Trump himself, or like-minded people do all they can to undermine the new administration, which is another way of saying that even if Trump has been defeated, it is clear that Trumpism has not met the same fate. It is wrong to "believe that Trump and Trumpism are aberrations and that Biden's victory represents the restoration of an American consensus somehow hijacked by Trump". For Rieff, reality is on the other hand, although that perspective offers comfort "nothing could be further from the truth". "The United States is divided in two as never before since the Great Depression of the 1930s. And Biden is no Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Somehow, the problems have just begun," the American analyst explained. 

 The challenges facing Joe Biden are enormous and the possibilities limited. "You're going to have to decide whether to focus on rural, white, trumpist poverty or on urban, black, Hispanic poverty. He is likely to go for the former, because of political urgency. But the Democratic coalition is demanding the latter. This underscores how difficult it is to build a welfare society with targeted policies rather than universal programmes," said former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda. "When Trump was elected president in 2016, liberals and leftists, that is, the residents of the so-called blue zone, the "progressive" Americans, were in shock. Somehow the establishment media [...] spent the four years of Trump's presidency in a state of denial, as if his victory was against the natural order of things. At the same time, the "conservative" United States, which is suburban, extra-urban and rural, felt that it had been liberated from a political and cultural tyranny - especially in matters of race, gender and faith - under which it had suffered during the presidency of Barack Obama. In this election that just passed "Trump received significantly more votes than he had in his successful 2016 campaign, including more black votes than any other Republican presidential candidate in the past six decades, and a small but significant share of the Latino vote, and not just in Florida where the Latino electorate, not only Cuban but also Colombian, Venezuelan and Nicaraguan, is fervently anti-communist and not without reason sees the Democratic Party as favouring reconciliation rather than confrontation with the Cuban and Venezuelan dictatorships," Rieff documented, adding that "Biden will also face challenges from the left. "During the primaries, he barely managed to defeat his progressive rivals, especially Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. And like those loyal to Trump, they have not gone away either. Biden will govern with a Republican-majority Senate and will have to "make compromises with the body's Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, to get any major bill passed. Biden will be a rebuilder who will seek to redress some policies and disasters caused by Trump, but there will be no major changes: "Wall Street's cheerful reaction to the imminent arrival of a Democratic president and a Republican Senate is a good indicator of how few significant things in economic terms will change in the next four years," Rieff said.  

As for the new US administration's concerns and expectations with Latin America, those related to its campaign promises on the migration issue stand out, which was exacerbated by Trump "with its obvious repercussions in Mexico and Central America," as Carlos Malamud pointed out in a recent analysis where he recalled that "Latin America has more implications for the United States, starting with being one more area where it will clash with China. Although Biden will seek to cool down the tension with Beijing "there will not be a Copernican turn". "The frontal struggle will continue on all fronts and in all parts of the globe. The first question is therefore whether the pressure will continue or increase on Latin American governments and entrepreneurs to distance themselves from China", said Malamud, recalling that the 8th Summit of the Americas will be held in the United States in 2021. "It will be the best opportunity to fully assess the direction and strategy of the new Administration's Latin American policy". Cuba, Venezuela and Mexico are, for obvious reasons, the countries that are generating most interest these days with respect to the relationship they will assume with the Biden-Harris government, according to the analysis of the researcher from the Spanish think tank The Elcano Royal Institute.

The different governments of the world recognised the victory of the Biden-Harris formula from noon on Saturday and over the weekend. They did so after the US media announced, as it is the tradition in that country, that Joe Biden will be the 46th president of the United States, according to projections. At that point in the vote count, Biden's victory over Trump was clear and allowed the announcement to be made. What's more, Biden could extend his lead. If he already got 290 votes from the Electoral College, these could grow a little more in the coming weeks. There are governors who still do not recognize, let alone congratulate, President-elect Joe Biden, namely Vladimir Putin (Russia), Jair Messias Bolsonaro (Brazil), Andrés Manuel López Obrador (Mexico) and a few others. As may be expected, not everyone celebrates the results of the elections, particularly Trump and his voters. The outgoing president has endlessly repeated that he was robbed of victory and announced legal action. Did he, at the end of his term, come out convinced of the institutionality and legal procedures? There were also striking reactions on social networks. Progressives and feminists who claimed to be indifferent to the US electoral process. Why? As a matter of "principle", it was read out there. That Kamala Harris has a "questionable" political background. And that a black woman and daughter of immigrants is going to be the next vice president of the United States seems little and tastes nothing to them. They insist that it doesn't matter whether it's Biden or Trump. Is it possible, however, that these voices do in fact coincide with Trump on some issues and in the eyes of the world? At one point the extremes meet and make it possible, as now, to appreciate the confluence of the most populist and irrational left with the extreme right.  

"Anyway, the world is better since Saturday. Perfect, it will never be. 

 Addenda: Talking about the return to forms and that not all means are valid for achieving ends, as well as the need to restore the conditions for public debate degraded by Donald Trump and his fake news, a video is circulating on social networks that does not honour the vice-president-elect. Stephen Colbert asked Kamala Harris a few months ago why during the debates she accused Joe Biden of being a racist and guilty of the sexual harassment allegations he received and how it is that they (Harris and Biden) are now so friendly. She replied, laughing, that " it was a debate". And she went on laughing.