Good morning, and welcome to the Hillary News & Views Great British Breakfast, a weekly delve into what’s being said about the US elections in the European press.
The excerpts provided from non-English language sources have been translated by humans. The links provided to those articles, though, point to Google Translate versions of the pages and therefore aren’t in good English, but it’s good enough to get the general idea — and of course there’s a button to take you to the original, should you be up to it.
Last week, the papers were full of articles expressing shock that Trump had emerged as the Republican nominee. This week, there has been a plethora of articles which some might consider concern trolling but reflect the real fear in Europe that Trump might yet win.
Let’s start with Der Spiegel's view:
Trump’s strategy is clear. He hopes to be able to change the whole electoral map. He wants to turn all the accepted certainties of election research on their head — with the billionaire not being the one underneath.
Trump has his eyes on winning not just the Republican and key swing states, because his primary goal is to beat the Democrats in their own back yard. That means he is trying to conquer states which haven’t voted for a Republican in decades. Among these are the old industrial states of Pennsylvania and Michigan. Trump believes that his antiglobalization message can get traction in the working class strongholds of the so-called “Rust Belt”.
Trump’s advantage: For months, his populist message has been turning out voters who have hardly ever or never voted in the past, whether because of apathy or out of genuine frustration with politics. Trump is therefore mobilizing new demographics — chiefly among the white population. He will want to do the same in the Presidential election itself, and a recent poll shows Trump only 1% behind Clinton in the Democrats’ fortress of Pennsylvania.
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung offers the following:
Trump has ploughed up the Republicans’ political landscape and has shredded many of the supposed axioms of voter behavior and campaign strategy. Polling in several states has been off far too often to blindly trust the pollsters currently predicting him to fail spectacularly against Clinton.
In particular, the former Secretary of State and First Lady Hillary Clinton must not. She clearly carries round some baggage. Many Americans simply don’t trust her. She polls poorly on authenticity and integrity. You can’t even say that she has the Democratic Party at her feet. Her leftist rival Bernie Sanders just notched up another victory in the coal state of West Virginia. Seen as a hero of the “little white people”, Sanders just won’t give up, even though he has no realistic chance of the nomination. And each victory is a scratch on Clinton’s regal aura.
In fact, early polling casts doubt on the hypothesis that Clinton will have an easy victory over Trump. In three “battleground” states, the two candidates are more or less even. in Pennsylvania and Florida, Clinton is slightly ahead; in Ohio, it’s Trump. That suggests that nothing is yet decided even though the demographics give Clinton a big advantage, so she should not make the mistake of thinking she is going to sail easily into the White House. She will have to maximize her vote among women, blacks and Latinos — Trump will be targeting his greatest efforts at white men, his main source of support, and the type of voter who most distrusts Clinton.
It is not likely that Donald Trump will succeed President Obama in the White House, but it’s by no means impossible. Hillary Clinton will have to summon up all her energy for a main election which will be much more brutal than the primaries. Those have already exposed her weaknesses. For America’s sake, one must hope they don’t prove her undoing.
The Glasgow Herald has a go at reassuring Scots that a Trump presidency is unlikely, but is not blind to the possibility of an upset:
The result is not a foregone conclusion, though. Clinton is unpopular too, and getting less popular the longer her battle for the Democratic nomination against Senator Bernie Sanders goes on. In the latest polls, around fifty-four percent of voters view her unfavourably.
She is also, for all her mastery of policy detail, a clumsy politician. How else to explain her debate pledge that “we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” This is not the way to win Ohio. Nor is her evasive response when a laid-off miner in West Virginia challenged her about it: “I don’t know how to explain it other than what I said was totally out of context from what I meant.”
The more carefully she chooses her words, the more appealing Trump’s candour appears, no matter how nonsensical or offensive the content. He also plays the media like a piano, to the tune, so far, of more than $2 billion in free air time.
France's Liberation has this, looking at the fight over the women’s vote:
Of all the categories of voters that Donald Trump insulted during his populist and victorious race for the Republican nomination, women and their “big No” now represent his biggest handicap.
Weighed down by his sexist remarks, he starts from a very, very low point. Among women, 70% have an unfavorable opinion, according to a recent Gallup poll. And in his own camp, Republican women are three times less likely than men to support him.
This means that Trump has a serious problem with women, his opponents are counting on being able to fully exploit. The line he chose Friday and Saturday was worthy of the series House of Cards, with the Clintons instead of the Underwoods. During several meetings in Eugene (Oregon), Spokane and Lynden (Washington), Trump insisted that Clinton had no right to lecture him on how he treats women. To weaken the Democratic candidate, he exhumed the escapades of her husband, making particular reference to Monica Lewinsky scandal.... Calling the former first lady "opportunistic", he went on to say "Some of these women have been destroyed, not by him but by how Hillary Clinton treated them after it all came out "
In doing so, Trump may strike a chord with some on the American left. "Hillary has never shown any solidarity with these women. All those who, every day, are subjected to their bosses’ advances felt let down by it at the time. It's one of the reasons why she is valued but not liked" says a New York Democrat in her fifties.
Since these cases date back to the early 90s, many young voters have no direct memory of them. Trump's advisers hope that hammering them will eventually pay off, encouraging the younger generation to explore the details of these scandals. But it could also have the opposite effect, reports the New York Times, the risk being that voters "do eventually rally behind the candidate."
Simon Carswell explores the same theme in the Irish Times:
His strategy against Clinton, if it amounts to one, is risky given his poor standing with female voters. Women with a negative impression of him rank from 67 per cent in a recent Fox News poll to 74 per cent in a Washington Post/ABC News poll. He could lose women to Clinton by at least 25 points in November, polls show.
“He clearly has a problem with women and he is going to have to address that as the campaign goes forward and the reason is that woman are going to be half of all voters in November. They will probably be 53 to 54 per cent of all voters,” says Karlyn Bowman, a public opinion analyst at the American Enterprise Institute.
By attacking Clinton on playing the gender card, Trump might be following a strategy George W Bush used against John Kerry in 2004 when he questioned his war hero status in the “Swift Boat” campaign that claimed the Democratic nominee had inflated his Vietnam war record, according to Katherine Jellison, a professor of history at Ohio University who studies gender issues.
“If Trump is following a thought-out strategy, he is taking a page from the playbook that some other Republican candidates have in the past which is to take what seems like on the surface appears to be your opponent candidate’s strong point and somehow try to turn it into a weakness,” says Jellison.
Nicholas Richter, writing in Munich's Sueddeutsche Zeitung, devotes most of his analysis to how Sanders is both helping and hindering Hillary. After enumerating several instances where Hillary has taken Bernie’s more progressive proposals on board, thereby shifting leftward, it goes on:
It could turn out that he will help Clinton with her message in the general election. Her presumptive opponent Trump often talks like a lefty, criticizing free trade and the loss of jobs, opposing kneejerk interventionism abroad and promising universal healthcare. Although Trump outraged the conservatives in his own party with it, he hopes they will be offset in the general election by swing voters and even die-hard Democrats, especially in the industrial Northeast. That Clinton had to shift to the left some time ago, could still prove to be a strategic advantage in the duel with Trump.
But now it is May and this is the time when America's parties gradually leave the primary campaigns behind them and pivot to the real opponent in the fall. The longer Sanders remains in the competition, the longer it pins Clinton between two fronts, fighting Trump as well as her own party colleague. They probably harm her, especially because Sanders is making very personal attacks, questioning her integrity and judgment.
The fact is, the Clintons being close to big money is problematic, and (see the Iraq war) Clinton sometimes seems too interventionist. It is however obvious who ultimately benefits from Sanders' attacks: Trump. He has already announced that he will use the Sanders quotes about Clinton's "poor judgment" in his campaign commercials.
What America has in prospect for the fall is an election between two vulnerable candidates. Both embody the old establishment and are close to big money, both are, in the end, unpopular. But Trump would be the greater evil without a doubt; his character raises fears that his presidency would even be dangerous. Bernie Sanders must now help to stop Trump. The sooner he helps Hillary Clinton, the better for America and the world.
In the same paper, Matthias Kolb disagrees about Bernie dropping out:
It’s about the Sanders fansThousands have left their jobs or taken time off from studying to volunteer throughout the country, telling voters that there really is a politician taking the fight to hypercapitalism. They are thrilled that a candidate is saying the obvious things: for example, that a decent standard of living is impossible on a minimum wage of 7.25 dollars an hour.
Sanders is revered (no verb fits better) by his fans because he just will not compromise. Although Sanders' chances of the nomination are tiny, thousands of Bernie activists are in California volunteering to educate voters in the most populous state.
It's true that Sanders was sharply attacking Clinton as recently as April, but for the last two weeks he has moderated his tone and is mainly attacking Trump. But if he announced the end of his candidacy today, he would do Clinton more harm than help her. A premature end would be seen by the Sanders Followers as treason - and it would not be enough if the challenger were suddenly to say: "From now on you please support Mrs. Clinton!"
The reservations his followers have about the former First Lady are still huge, especially among the Twitter activists whose passion the Democrats need. But these can be overcome more easily if Bernie holds out to the end, loses by not too much “with dignity” and then works in co-operation with someone like the left’s icon Elizabeth Warren. Vice President he will not be: it's now about influence on the party program and the staging of the convention.
The above article is a two-pager. You get to read the second half by clicking on the red rectangle on the bottom right of the text (and the second half is probably the better one, so you might as well click there).
Over in Russia, comment is less about who is going to win than what it means for Russo-American relations. At Ukraina.ru (a Russian site despite its name), Chairman of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, Russia Fyodor Lukyanov says:
Regardless of the outcome of the election (and the odds are great that Hillary Clinton will win), there is going to be a major political upheaval, shifting sentiment in American society….
Trump plays into to a real and growing divide that exists everywhere: [between] a globalized community that participates in international processes, and those still tied to the national soil. This is happening everywhere, not only in the United States. European protest parties are a product of the same contradictions, but in the Old World their enemy is institutionalized - the European Union, a soulless supranational and unelected bureaucracy.
The phenomenon of Trump and Bernie Sanders (a Democratic Socialist, another discovery of this campaign) demonstrates what society really cares about and how people are alienated from their leaders….
The United States, the leader of global processes since the end of the 1980s, has acknowledged a change in its approach. Instead of managing a single world economy, as it formerly tried to do, it has set a course toward fragmentation, creating an American-centric core that opposes the rest of the world.
With only one predictable primary to report on during the week, reporters have been looking for other things to write about. Liberation is one of several papers to profile Gary Johnson;Wedged between mastodons Hillary Clinton for the Democrats and Donald Trump for the Republicans, the probable third man in the race, Libertarian Gary Johnson, is trying to survive. This week in Washington, the former Governor of New Mexico, 63, tieless and wearing sneakers, has been doing the rounds of the press corps to establish a media presence.
"I am the all-in-one candidate,” he says in his interviews“I am to Hillary’s left on social issues, and I'm more conservative than Ted Cruz on economic issues. I represent the best of both worlds." He also says he is “180 degrees opposite to Donald Trump," and numerous analysts suggest a possible shift by Republican voters opposed to the real estate tycoon towards Gary Johnson. Founded in 1971, the United States Libertarian Party puts individual freedom at the forefront and wants to reduce the role of the federal government to a bare minimum, particularly in the economy. Here are eight things to know about the likely future candidate of the Libertarian Party, who is no more crazy than his Republican rival .
…
2. He holds the record for vetoes of bills
Gary Johnson thinks there should be as few laws as possible. When he was Republican governor of New Mexico from 1994 to 2003, Gary Johnson vetoed no less than 750 legislative proposals ... "That's more than all other governors combined!" boasts his campaign website . The massive use of the veto also earned him the nickname "Governor Veto."
It’s amazing that Kossacks aren’t filling up the dreck list with diaries analyzing the serious threat Johnson poses, but that just shows what we know, doesn’t it?
Since this is HNV, there needs to be something positive about the Democratic candidate, so I’ll just bask in my own tiny effect on this election as one of 1.3 million butterflies who flapped their wings in London 10 days ago and got the Trumpster to moderate his rhetoric about banning Muslims from entering the USA as we elected Sadiq Khan as our mayor. Lara Rebello writes in the International Business Times UK:
According to him, the real estate tycoon is manipulating people by playing on their fears rather than addressing them. Calling Trump and his team's views of Islam ignorant, Khan pointed out: "It is possible to be a Muslim and to live in the West. And it's possible to be a Muslim and to love America."
Khan said he would definitely find a way to go to America where he plans to meet with other leaders to discuss business, climate change and crime control. "So, of course, I'll travel to America. But I'm hoping that he's not the guy that wins".
While the 45-year-old mayor has taken a strong anti-Trump stand, he also voiced his support for Hillary Clinton and hopes to see a female US president soon. "Just imagine the message it sends to my daughters and to girls around the world that the President of the United States of America is a woman, not any woman, a woman with the gravitas, with the experience, somebody who is a unifier in leading the USA."And she'll be an inspiration. I'm quite clear in my mind who I want to be the president of the USA."
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