Midterms with global repercussions

It is difficult to overstate the impact of Tuesday’s midterm elections, both for the United States and for the rest of the world. The midterm elections, in which the entire House of Representatives and one-third of the Senate are up for renewal, are being framed as an opportunity to pass judgment on President Donald Trump’s performance. Nearly two years after his return to power and a decade after his first surprise victory, Americans are voting on the latest chapter of one of the most extraordinary political careers in the history of modern democracy.Trump still has two years left in the White House. If, as the polls predict, the Democrats regain one or both chambers, they will have enough power to complicate the final stretch of his second term. They could even pursue impeachment proceedings to remove him from office. One open question is how the MAGA movement, his core base of supporters, will react. Despite their unwavering backing of Trump, they are beginning to show tentative signs of fatigue. And they have reasons similar to those of their fellow citizens to turn away from him: an ill-conceived military venture in Iran that has helped drive up energy prices, an administration and presidential family that make no effort to conceal corruption, a harsh campaign against immigrants, and an economy that, while growing, is being weighed down by inflation and the rising cost of living.Against this unfavorable backdrop, the response from the U.S. president has been to urge people to vote as if he himself were on the ballot, another demonstration of Trump’s extraordinary self-confidence, and one that helps explain why he believed he could overturn the polls by crisscrossing the most competitive states and holding nearly 30 rallies. Inevitably, these speeches have turned into spectacles filled with insults, crude jokes, falsehoods and off-the-cuff remarks that have at times been bewildering, even coming from someone who has successfully made such gestures and rhetoric his trademark.Another open question is whether, in the event of defeat, Trump and his supporters will accept the results. That cannot be taken for granted, given the precedent of his loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, which culminated in the storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters. Over the past year, his administration has tried a wide range of tactics, from attacks on mail-in voting to spreading the false claim of a supposed wave of undocumented voters, as well as threatening to deploy federal agents to polling stations. Efforts to undermine trust in the electoral system are not unique to the United States, but what happens there in the coming days will send a signal to the rest of the world about the strength of U.S. democracy.There is also another possibility: if the Democrats win a majority on Capitol Hill and the president accepts the result without contesting it, Trump’s domestic agenda could grind to a halt, prompting the White House to focus its attention on foreign policy. From Iran to Cuba and from Ukraine to Latin America, the United States has no shortage of issues on its plate. And even if his domestic agenda faces greater constraints, Trump would still retain considerable scope to sow chaos and division abroad. A Republican defeat would come as a relief to U.S. allies, but the greatest mistake Europe and other democracies could make would be to believe that these midterms will bring a return to normalcy.Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition