PARIS — As inward looking as Americans can be, it’s worth remembering that our politics don’t live in a vacuum.
Eight summers ago, Britain’s stunner of a vote to leave the European Union foretold the other disruptive political event of the year. The same willingness to reject established norms, anger at the changes brought by immigration and globalization, and the gut appeal of an insurgent populist campaign put Donald Trump in the White House.
So what’s the Brexit of this summer?
I don’t see a single portent. But looking at the U.S. from the outside can be revealing, and five trends or events do stand out. Two are good omens for Kamala Harris, two for Trump and one’s a tossup.
Rise of Strong Women
Female leaders rule the summer.
Claudia Sheinbaum beat another woman in June to claim the Mexican presidency in a historic landslide. Next month’s leadership race for Japan’s ruling party opens up the path, even the possibility is novel, for the country’s first female prime minister in Foreign Minister Kamikawa Yoko.
Over here in Europe, the gender divide has a new wrinkle. Europe’s weakest politicians these days are France’s Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Olaf Scholz.
The strongest? Their first names are Ursula, Kaja, Giorgia and Mette — with a nod to a Donald (Poland’s Tusk, more on himlower down).
Ursula von der Leyen last month won a second term atop the European Commission, the most powerful EU body, with more support than five years ago. The German center-right politician — JD Vance may wish to know that she is a mother of seven — has been a surprisingly strong crisis manager. Surprisingly because she was a very mediocre German defense minister, but in this bigger executive role she gets highmarks for leading the EU through Covid, a cost-of-living crisis and the Ukraine conflict. Joining her in the leadership team in Brussels will be Kaja Kallas, the EU’s new foreign policy chief (the third woman in that job). As Estonia’s first female prime minister, Kallas made an international name for herself as one of the most vocal European hawks on Russia after Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022.
In European capitals, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen stand out. The prime ministers, who come from opposite political camps, have built strong domestic positions and had an impact on the larger stage — the right-wing Meloni by supporting Ukraine and calming the harder right and the left-wing Frederiksen by challenging her political campwith a hardline approach to migration.
What explains all this? Possibly mere chance, besides that there are simply more women in high places. But some common threads are notable. None of the Euro quartet make much of their gender. Their parties span the political shore, from the furthest reaches of the right to the left. They also come across as tough and serious.
Advantage: Harris, naturally.
American Front of Middle East Conflict
The new crop of women presidents of America’s elite universities are having a harder time than their political peers. Columbia’s Minouche Shafik stepped down last week, the third female leader in the Ivies to resign in the wake of the war in Gaza.
Her reasons to leave, effective immediately, are somewhat murky but the main takeaway — supported by other evidence — is that the Middle East’s going to make for a hot fall on campuses and therefore in American politics.
At the start of the year, senior Democrats expected-slash-hoped Gaza would be off the metaphorical front pages in time for the general election: Iran contained, the Gaza conflict petering out and domestic politics defused.
Nope. Events in the Middle East, mostly beyond America’s control, have in recent weeks turned the heat back up. Hezbollah and Iran are weighing possible retaliatory strikes on Israel. The Israelis keep the war machine moving through Gaza. Joe Biden’s exit in favor of Harris didn’t dissuade protesters from coming out in Chicago. The cultural fissures play so well into Republican narratives about “wokeism” and antisemitism run unchecked on the left.
Advantage: Trump. Barring these long shots … an attack by Iran that endangers Israel and brings on a regional conflict that requires American intervention, or some historic diplomatic and political breakthrough that opens the way to a regional settlement, brings the country together behind the current leadership in Washington.
Joyfully Normal
The Harris-Walz “happy warrior” routine — when was the last time an American presidential candidate promised “passion and love” as Kamala Harris has? — fits the summer mood.
The good vibes of the Paris Olympics turned the French joyful. For years now, gloom had replaced arrogance as the defining national characteristic here, driven by real and imagined perceptions of decline and more recent political troubles, with a hung parliamentary election producing no obvious government earlier this summer.
“Proud to be French,” as the rising French left leader Raphael Glucksmann puts it. The extreme left and right in France, led by an older generation, can sound downbeat on the present and future the way that the Republican standard-bearer can. (Carnage, as in Trump’s “American,” is originally a French word.) The 44-year-old Glucksmann, who was part of the unified left bloc that came in a stunning first in last month’s parliamentary elections, project positivity. That’s now very Paris 2024.
We’re at a political moment where joy and normalcy have locked hands — in opposition to the anger and theatrics of the leaders of the current populist wave. In Poland, Prime Minister Tusk (that rare strong male European leader) defeated Poland’s populist right that seemed unbeatable a year ago for the second time in nine months. Tusk projects competence and normalcy. In Britain, Prime Minister Keir Starmer is hardline boring, which got the Labour leader the most resounding election victory in the party’s history last month.
The bigger question from Europe is has the nationalist/populist wave unleashed by Brexit crested or even started to recede? Yes on the former, jury’s open on latter. The center right did better than expected in June’s elections for the European Parliament. But the further right did well too, and runs the governments in the Netherlands, Italy, Hungary and Slovakia. France has never had as many far-right legislators in its national parliament or in Brussels.
Advantage: Ever so slightly Harris, on atmospherics more than hard facts.
Still Many Angry, Unhappy People
Starmer’s honeymoon was brief. The riots across Blighty this month were the other story of the European summer — showing off, through violence, the anger over immigration. It’s beside the point that a bit of misinformation about the man who killed three young girls set off the spree (he was neither a migrant nor a Muslim, as many believed, but did have a foreign name).
Labour’s new government got a far more violent taste from the far right than what the Biden camp has faced politically from its left over Gaza: A no-win situation. Starmer slammed the anti-immigrant far-right, as the facts merited, yet that opened him up as being too soft on Islamism and antisemitism.
Advantage: Trump by long way.
Ukraine’s August Surprise
Ukraine’s successful invasion of Russia — dwell, for a moment, on these five words— is a master stroke of public relations that may or may not carry strategic consequences.
In taking a chunk of Russia’s Kursk province, the Ukrainians have changed the narrative, for a moment, around Europe’s worst war since 1945. They have exposed the rot and incompetence in Putin’s military, and embarrassed him, as the failure of the Russian assault on Kyiv did in 2022. They provided the best answer to the gloom that set in last year with the failure of Ukraine’s counteroffensive, the previous narrative turning point of the war. Now they’re trying to hold that ground and distract and hold off an ongoing Russian assault on their eastern front.
Like it or not, America’s standing in the world will be determined by whether its ally Ukraine or Putin and his patron China win this conflict. Biden’s drip-drip of arms and restrictions on their use has hurt Ukraine’s ability to make significant enough gains on the battlefield to shift the momentum. Is Kursk going to be a blip in the war — or that moment when Ukraine and its backers, America above all, see and seize an opening to end it on terms they can live with? The coming weeks will provide answers on the ground in Ukraine, in the White House and on the campaign trail.
Advantage: Toss up. As I wrote earlier this month, Harris and especially Trump have sent mixed signals and have the flexibility to go in various directions on Ukraine.
5 global trends that will shape the US election
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