by: XHABIR DERALLA
A fierce election finale in the United States. The situation is changing by the minute, so that’s why it’s important to say the date and time of this attempt to scan this world event, the US elections, which has a strong impact on the lives of every living person on the planet: November 5, 2020, 5.00 pm Central European Time. Even after the end of the election race, before the winner is announced in this American fight of the titans, the whole world is still following the situation with tightly clenched thumbs and “nail biting” as New York Times writes. Some world and domestic analysts have already implied uncertainty and political tensions after the elections in the most powerful country on the planet, especially since now, the obvious loser Donald Trump, has no intention to easily accept defeat.
The political and social scene in the US, but also around the world, has never been so divided as in the Trump era. In parallel to Trump’s rule, the world is witnessing also political and military tensions and conflicts among the most powerful countries in the world.
And the hybrid war that Putin’s Russia is leading, all change the face of the world we live in. It’s a world in which human rights and freedoms are increasingly more being questioned, and in first place comes the ever more expressed need of security at multiple levels, from physical to health and up to cyber security.
The situations, events and processes around the world in which the US have a strong, and often decisive influence, speak of new standards of leading politics and has imposed the need of mobilizing the progressive part of the world that, seemingly, in this period is defensive, if not withdrawing and losing the main pillars of democracy – public, media and civil society.
The US elections this year, like rarely before in the decades after the fall of the Iron Curtain, concurs with the needs for serious and deep re-examination of policies and practices at the global level. In the US, they are not only electing a new president, but also a new way of leading politics.
Such a turnaround will have an impact, not only in the US, but around the whole world.
The United States are political and economic trendsetters. There is much truth in the saying that “When America sneezes, the whole world catches a cold”. Although the world has long been multipolar, still, the social-political and economic trends in many ways depend on who is in power in the US, and how it exercises that power.
The world is deeply affected by the pandemic, terrorism, climate changes, economic, military and social crisis, as well as strong challenges that technological advances bring. The progressive part of the world expects that Democrat Joe Biden, after the election victory in his country, will be part of positive changes in conducting politics at the global level.
Nevertheless, despite the optimism, there is still the real possibility for the world to be further polarized, and for crises, being health, military, ideological, political, economic or environmental, to further deepen, especially since the centers of power that dictate illiberal tendencies, not that they don’t know how, but don’t want to overcome the challenges.
On the contrary, those centers of power cause crisis in the world, starting from their own countries and regions in which they exist. Destabilization at any level, for the centers of power that generate illiberal tendencies, is an opportunity for their strengthening and profiteering at many levels, not only financially.
In today’s context, the counting of votes in the United States is not the final phase of the election process, but is also the start of new challenges and tectonic shifts in world politics, to which no one is immune in this extremely connected, but also vulnerable world.
translation: Natasha Cvetkovska
