Nabil Najm al-Din ✍️
A writer specialized in the international affairs
Today, Tuesday, November 5, American voters head to the ballot boxes to vote for their candidate for the presidency of the country. After the voting ends, the votes are counted and the preliminary results of the elections are usually announced within 12 hours of the closing of the polling stations. After the votes are counted, the electoral process moves to the Electoral College, which consists of 538 electoral delegates. Each state is given a number of votes roughly in line with its population size. Therefore, the candidate needs to reach 270 Electoral College votes to win.
Members of the Electoral College meet to vote on the choice of the president and vice president on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December in the election year. Thus, the election of the president and vice president in the United States is done through indirect elections. For example, if a candidate wins a simple majority in California, he wins all 55 electoral college votes for the state. Thus, the candidate who wins the majority of voters’ votes in any state wins all the votes of the members of the electoral college representing that state, regardless of the percentage of popular votes he received in that state.
The American people and decision-making circles around the world have been preoccupied – and still are – with the following question: Will America elect its first woman president? Or will the elections result in a second term for Donald Trump? And what are the repercussions of the US presidential elections in November 2024 on the balance of international power and the global political scene?
It is worth noting that over the course of 59 presidential elections since the founding of the United States, during which 46 presidents have ruled the United States of America, not a single woman has been able to reach the seat of power.
This time, with the results of various opinion polls converging in the percentages obtained by the Democratic Party candidate Kamala Harris, aged 59, with the Republican Party candidate Donald Trump, aged 78, with a slight difference ranging from two to three points between them, and Harris has achieved a slight lead over Trump in the averages of national opinion polls since she entered the race at the end of last July, it can be said that the presidential elections taking place today deserve, with distinction, to be described as an absolutely historic presidential election, and the reason for that is that it may write a new chapter in the history of the United States of America if it results in Kamala Harris winning the votes of the voters and the Electoral College.. It will also be a historic election if Harris wins, because she will be the first American woman of Asian, African, and Jamaican origins to reach the White House.
But what are the repercussions of the election of Donald Trump, who was subjected to two assassination attempts and became the first former American president to be convicted of committing a crime in this election, on Arab issues?
The answer is simply the policies he has committed, including Trump’s violation of half a century of international consensus and international law and his recognition of Israel’s territorial sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which it occupied and seized from Syria during the 1967 war, and which it later annexed in a unilateral move.
Trump also brokered numerous normalization agreements with several Arab countries in an unprecedented manner.
Even worse, his administration recognized Jerusalem as “the capital of Israel,” in a move that violated Security Council resolutions and decades of American policy. Benjamin Netanyahu expressed his gratitude for all of the above, naming one of the Israeli settlements in the occupied Golan Heights after Trump, the settlement “Trump Heights”, as a reward from Netanyahu to the then US President Trump. I also do not forget nor forgive President Donald Trump’s brazen insolence towards Arab cultures, leaders and figures. So, may you be granted long life for those who expect good from Trump.
Washington in general suffers from a despicable duality in several international files. It applies one standard to Russia’s actions in Ukraine, and another standard to Israel’s actions in Gaza. Although the war in Sudan witnessed horrific atrocities, Washington still deals with the Sudanese file as a second-class file, and the same applies to various international files. Will the 2024 elections fix the broken US situation internally and internationally?
Let’s wait..!
Let’s follow.. !
Let’s see..!
