Is the United States facing a crisis of legitimacy?

The United States “is at war with itself today,” says analyst Ian Bremmer, founding president of the Eurasia Group, a company dedicated to geopolitical risk analysis that offers a speech on the state of the world every year.

And this time, he finds that the United States, his country and the world’s leading economic and military power, is in a real crisis. “No matter who wins on November 5, tens of millions of Americans will find evidence that their political system is broken. And they are not wrong about that,” he said. In fact, he warned that “the post-election period is exceptionally dangerous, as we are about to hold an election whose outcome will be perceived as illegitimate by almost half the country. What are we going to do about it? We will have a president in the United States. I mean, not on November 5th. We won’t know on the day who is going to win. We may not know in a week.

” But the real problem is that half the country will not accept it well. It doesn’t matter how legal or clean his victory is, because each side will have its version and will let the judicial system decide it – although Democrats complain that Republicans have “loaded” the system with conservative judges.

In 2021, then-President Donald Trump questioned early voting and mail-in ballots, tried to find ways and pressured state officials to overturn unfavorable results, and although he did not present any evidence, for four years he has questioned the integrity of the American electoral system.

Now they are preparing for what looks like the closest election in American history. “It will most likely be so close that both sides will say they won, and then there will be lawsuits, and there will be different lawsuits,” he said.

“Democrats will file lawsuits in some states claiming that there was harassment and intimidation of voters so they couldn’t go to the polls. They will say there was miscertification by local elected officials who decided to go into politics.

” Bremmer’s report adds that Republicans, in turn, “will say that Democrats should not have won in some states because illegals were allowed to vote because they had won, and then that victory was overturned by vote manipulation, and it was all rigged.

” In real terms, the American economic and geopolitical situation has not fundamentally changed. Surrounded by two oceans and with two friendly countries, Canada and Mexico on its borders, it does not seem to face threats. But its problem is structural, in the face of polarized and even contrary versions of democracy. Internal disagreement leads them to seek to withdraw from the role of world leadership that they, to a certain extent, sought and forged after the Second World War and for which they came to consider themselves the indispensable nation.

Nota publicada originalmente en el Heraldo de México