The U.S. Election Abroad
Twelve writers tell us what the race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris looks like where they live.
OCTOBER 3, 2024
The U.S. presidential election is decided by American citizens in a handful of states, but its outcome reverberates internationally: the new president will have the power to shape trade, migration, security and rising authoritarianism across the world, as well as the wars in Gaza and Ukraine. The race is therefore a global event, the subject of countless newspaper articles, debates and calculations. We asked 12 writers, each from a different country, to share what the conversation sounds like where they live: What are politicians saying, and how is the press covering the race? What are the hopes for a Kamala Harris presidency, or a Donald Trump one — and what are the fears? Our writers describe widely divergent attitudes toward the election and its unknown conclusion, from apathy and disillusionment to anxiety, hope and glee.
AFGHANISTAN
Lynzy Billing
In July, I was in Afghanistan making a documentary about Afghan trauma surgeons. I was sitting with a group of doctors, during a rare break in between surgeries, when an Italian doctor said, “Did you hear that someone tried to assassinate Trump?”
The Afghan surgeon gave a half-shrug, and replied that he was not following Trump’s campaign or the U.S. election.
Most of the Afghans I spoke with said they weren’t either.
It was understandable. They had lived through America’s 20-year war in Afghanistan. They had seen the invasion, the lives lost from American airstrikes and night raids, the false promises, and finally America’s betrayal, as it abandoned so many who had supported them over the years.
The Afghan surgeon had spent two decades treating individuals, mostly civilians, who had been injured by the fighting between the Taliban and the U.S.-backed government. He told me that no U.S. president had ever cared for Afghanistan or its people before, so he didn’t hold out hope that these candidates would be any different. “What did they actually do for Afghanistan? What did they build? They don’t care about us,” he said.
The stakes of the last U.S. presidential election, in 2020, were huge for Afghanistan. In February of that year, Washington had signed a peace deal with the Taliban as part of Donald Trump’s plan to withdraw U.S. troops from the country. At the same time the violence intensified across the country, at the cost of thousands of civilian lives.
Some Afghans hoped Trump would win and complete his promise for the U.S. to leave Afghanistan. Many of those against the peace process, which gave the Taliban a voice in Afghanistan’s future, had hoped that Joe Biden would continue to back Afghanistan’s government in its fight against the Taliban.
In the end, it didn't matter that Biden won. He continued the planned withdrawal. It was a shambles. Tens of thousands of at-risk Afghan allies of the U.S. government were left behind. Afghanistan was effectively handed over to the Taliban in August 2021. International support and aid rapidly dried up, and the country dropped from international media attention.
Today, Afghans have many bigger issues to deal with than the American presidential election. They face a severe economic and humanitarian crisis, with an estimated 23.7 million people in need of humanitarian assistance and 48 percent of the population living below the poverty line.
While conversations about Afghanistan are now few and far between in American political discourse, some Afghan and American advocates continue to push U.S. political candidates for legal pathways for Afghan refugees. In Afghanistan, the surgeon and his colleagues had little hope that any headway would be made, no matter who wins the election.
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LYNZY BILLING is an investigative journalist, photographer and filmmaker reporting on Afghanistan, Iraq and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
BOLIVIA
Claudia Peña Claros (Tr. Robin Myers)
Until just a few months ago, when it still appeared that the U.S. electoral battle would be waged by two white octogenarian men, Donald Trump’s victory seemed all but assured to Bolivians and there was little interest in the outcome of the vote. Interest (or concern) focused instead on the intensification of hate and denialist discourse in everyday speech in the U.S. With the emergence of Kamala Harris, the race has mustered much greater interest. In conversations among friends, topics emerge that weren’t previously discussed, including the candidates’ stances on abortion and the importance of increasing voter participation.
At the same time, the campaign is now exposing the real mechanisms that define how democracy operates. The hundreds of millions of dollars raised by the candidates; their position statements on massacres and wars; the way these conflicts and U.S. foreign policy are entangled with economic interests — none of this leaves much room for democratic optimism.
But it does raise questions about the idea of a “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” which underpins the very concept of democracy. How much do ordinary people really influence the outcome that is produced using their votes? How much do major news conglomerates affect their decisions? How few hands determine the algorithms that shape the general mood, opinion and intolerance shared via social media? And what is the state of the mental health of the multimillionaire men who control those platforms?
Bolivia, too, is undergoing a kind of disillusionment with democracy. Politicians struggle more and more to reach young people, much less tune into their concerns and priorities. The internal war within the Movimiento al Socialismo — or MAS-IPSP, the largest political party in Bolivian history — seems limited to determining the next candidate in Bolivia’s 2025 presidential elections, neglecting broader debates on how to solve the country’s economic, ecological and energy crises. Many people feel that politicians are far removed from their concrete concerns.
Harris’s possible presidency also raises interesting questions about the symbolic power of bodies — how meaningful would it really be to have a woman of color in the White House? In Bolivia, the rise of Evo Morales as the first-ever indigenous president marked a significant change from prior administrations, which historically answered to the interests of corporate, mining, and landholding elites. Would Harris securing the White House translate into public policies that prioritize people’s rights over economic interests? Or could it be that the political game is only ever about preserving power?
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CLAUDIA PEÑA CLAROS is a poet, fiction writer, and essayist born in Bolivia. Her short story “Child” was published in our Fiction issue in August. ROBIN MYERS is a poet, translator, essayist, and 2023 NEA Translation Fellow.
CHINA
Lavender Au
“If you hadn’t asked, I wouldn’t have known there was an election,” a white-collar worker, whose boss had a day job in the state apparatus, told me. No one around her was talking about the U.S. election. If they did talk politics, it was about the domestic economy.
The Chinese media are following the election and policy pledges, though state news agency Xinhua is quick to point out that campaign promises are often “checks that can’t be cashed.” On Douyin, China’s version of TikTok, political commentators dissect possible outcomes and American attitudes toward China, but a video of the unboxing of a new Huawei phone still gets far more views, shares and comments than one of Donald Trump being shot.
The U.S. election is “tea table gossip,” an entrepreneur told me, whose circles include factory owners and investors. People “mostly focus on the funny bits,” he said.
Whatever the electoral outcome, “the impact on China will be the same,” a former soldier who spends much of his retirement on Douyin told me. He conceded that Trump would be more unpredictable. “Unless China changes [its foreign policy], relations between the two countries will worsen,” he said. There were two camps, he said, those that believe decoupling pushes China into greater self-reliance and ultimately strengthens the country, and those who believe that it hurts the country. He was in the latter camp.
A well-dressed designer, who had studied in the U.S., told me the outcome would “influence market mood.” If relations worsened, Chinese brands wanting to break into the U.S. market would find it even harder. Things would stay the same if Kamala Harris won, she said, and get worse if Trump did. She was following the election for personal reasons. “I may move back,” she said.
In early September, Trump’s pledge to put 100 percent tariffs on nations that don’t use the dollar was trending on Weibo, the country’s most popular microblogging platform. “He’s crazy, him saying crazy things is expected,” a popular podcast host said to me. The presidential race so far had convinced him that “our system is better.” Two-party politics, in his view, made the government less efficient and divided the country. “Both of them,” he said of Trump and Harris, “will treat China as an enemy,” he said. “They do have that in common.”
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LAVENDER AU is a writer from London currently based in Beijing. Her piece on why Mickey Mouse isn’t popular in China appeared in our Land issue.
EGYPT
Hossam el-Hamalawy
Egyptians followed the 2020 U.S. presidential race between Joe Biden and Donald Trump more closely than Americans themselves, several fellow journalists and activists joked at the time. There was certainly a grain of truth in this. After all, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi — the former minister of defense who led a military coup against the country’s first democratically elected president in 2013 and has since ruled the country with a fearful security apparatus — was Trump’s “favorite dictator.”
Egyptians rightly felt their autocrat could not have gotten away with such repressive practices without international support, especially from the leader of the “Free World.” Meanwhile, in the run-up to the 2020 election, Biden had promised to hold Sisi accountable and end such preferential treatment. When he was elected, the hopes of desperate Egyptians skyrocketed. Rights campaigners expected a good number of incarcerated regime critics to be released. A former political prisoner told me there was jubilation among political detainees who thought there would finally be international pressure to release them.
Their hopes were soon dashed.
The outbreak of fighting in Gaza in 2021 created an opportunity for Sisi to present himself to the new U.S. administration as a force of stability in the region. He helped to mediate a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel. Biden, a deeply committed self-described Zionist, fell back on the same old pragmatic model: backing dictators as long as they served the U.S.’s national security interests. Last month, the Biden administration approved $1.3 billion in military aid for Egypt, despite the concerns raised by some U.S. lawmakers and rights groups about the country’s human rights violations.
The current U.S. election has been met with broad apathy from Egyptians, who hardly discuss it on social media or in informal chats. Whatever its outcome, business will remain as usual. The election is seen as a competition between a fanatic racist pro-Israeli Islamophobe and Biden’s vice president, who has enabled the destruction of Gaza and the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians, and helped Sisi consolidate his military dictatorship.
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HOSSAM EL-HAMALAWY is an Egyptian journalist and scholar-activist, currently based in Berlin.
GEORGIA
Joshua Kucera
When Donald Trump was shot, leaders of Georgian Dream, Georgia’s ruling party, immediately knew who to blame: the “global war party.”
This “party,” for the uninitiated, is part of a conspiracy theory concocted by Georgian Dream shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. According to this theory, an international organization — the “global war party” — is pulling the strings in U.S. and European governments with the goal of prolonging the war in Ukraine and opening a “second front” in Georgia.
This rhetoric marks a dramatic turn for a country once considered one of the West’s most loyal allies: Ties between Georgia and the U.S. used to be tight enough that it didn’t particularly matter which party was in power in either country. That is no longer the case.
The Georgian ruling party’s broadsides against the West have been accompanied by a sharp authoritarian turn, and the Biden administration has responded by pausing aid to the country and slapping visa sanctions on several senior Georgian Dream officials.
Georgian Dream, unsurprisingly, thinks it might get a better deal under Donald Trump. Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze claimed that “if Trump wins the elections, the war in Ukraine will end sooner and, accordingly, our region will calm down sooner.” When Trump was shot, Kobakhidze posted a photo of the ex-president with his fist raised on Facebook. “The global war party does not change methods,” the PM wrote, cryptically.
This embrace of Trump was also tactical, as U.S. polls showed that the Republican nominee appeared to be cruising to a return to the White House. Then Joe Biden dropped out and the Democratic ticket was brought back from the dead. Georgian Dream officials have since gone quiet about the election.
They have more immediate worries, anyway: Georgia faces its own tense, high-stakes election just 10 days before the one in the U.S. But if the results of the Georgian election are messy — and the odds are not small — people will quickly look to Washington to see how the Americans respond. And whether the “global war party” has anything to say about it.
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JOSHUA KUCERA is a journalist based in Tbilisi. He wrote about Georgia’s struggle to adjust to an influx of Russian exiles for our “Debt” issue.
GERMANY
Tania Roettger
Germany is grappling with urgent national crises: The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has scored major victories in two eastern German states, inflaming the country’s debate on immigration, and the national coalition government in Berlin can’t seem to solve its many dysfunctions.
But that doesn’t prevent the country from keeping a close eye on the U.S. presidential election. Many news sites have a section dedicated to the election and publish, on average, two to three new articles on the race every day.
The dominant feeling after the debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden was disbelief that the parties could be putting forward candidates so clearly inadequate to the role. But right up until he withdrew his candidacy, Biden had defenders in high places: Chancellor Olaf Scholz reaffirmed his belief in his U.S. counterpart 10 days before Biden withdrew.
Trump, too, has his backers. Jens Spahn, a Bundestag member for the conservative Christian Democratic Union party, appealed to the German government to find common ground with the Republican nominee. “When was the last time Olaf Scholz had a phone call with Trump?” he asked.
As for Kamala Harris, the word typically used to describe what Germany can expect from her presidency is “continuity.” That is meant as a positive — and as a contrast to Trump.
Germans are aware, though, that a Democratic White House is likely to expect Germany to pull its weight on the global stage — by increasing its support for Ukraine and continuing to meet its NATO defense spending quota, for example.
Germany faces its own national elections next year. Its political system offers more variety than the U.S.’s two-party system, but as in the States, a growing number of voters seem to be disenchanted with traditional politics and find the drastic changes promised by extremist parties appealing.
That means that as Germans watch the U.S. election, they are also looking for a sign of what might happen at home.
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TANIA ROETTGER is a journalist based in Berlin. She wrote about the arms manufacturer Rheinmetall, and the small German town where it is based, for our Parties issue.
HUNGARY
Zalán Zubor
The U.S. presidential election is being covered extensively in Hungary, where it is expected to have a major impact on national politics.
Viktor Orbán’s right-wing government, and the media apparatus it controls, has made no secret that it wants to see Donald Trump win the election. Orbán considers the Republican nominee an ideological and geopolitical ally who shares his anti-immigration, anti-LGTBQ rights agenda. He also claims Trump understands the need to move away for a “unipolar world order” led by the U.S.
The Democratic party, meanwhile, is heavily demonized in pro-government media, which amplifies misinformation about Kamala Harris produced in the U.S. Orbán recently warned that if Harris wins, she will keep “exporting democracy.” The suggestion is that, under Harris, the U.S. embassy would likely continue to exert diplomatic pressure on Orbán’s government over its democratic backsliding and close ties with Russia. Orbán has also accused the Democrats (and philanthropist George Soros) of funding and influencing the Hungarian opposition, NGOs and independent media in the country.
Government officials have openly admitted that they are designing policies with a Trump victory in mind. “There is no plan B,” Márton Nagy, Hungary’s economy minister, told InfoRádió. Nagy claimed a Trump victory would end the war in Ukraine, which would help the government restore Hungary’s failing economy before the country’s next election in 2026.
It’s not a one-way street. The Orbán government also supports institutions close to Trump: Several government-funded organizations, such as the Danube Institute, a conservative think tank, have cooperated or hosted events with conservative U.S. groups like the Heritage Foundation and the America First Policy Institute. Hungarian Conservative, an English-language publication based in Budapest, promotes the policies of Hungary’s ruling party as a model for America’s right — particularly its tough stance on migration and its use of public funds to create think tanks, cultural institutions and media companies that advance its brand of conservatism.
The Orbán government hopes that a Trump victory will help it break out of its current isolation in the West. Relations between Hungary and the U.S. are at a historic low, and a Democrat victory would do little to fix that. But it is also unclear how much Orbán’s and Trump’s ideas of international politics actually align. Orbán, for example, has said he believes Asia, led by China, will become the center of global power and is courting closer ties, while Trump has promised to curb China’s economic influence.
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ZALÁN ZUBOR is an investigative journalist working for Atlatszo.hu, where he edits the site’s English language section.
INDIA
Saumya Roy
India is watching closely as one of its own is poised to make history in the United States. Kamala Harris becoming the Democratic nominee for U.S. president “is certainly a milestone for the Indian diaspora — when Harris was coming of age, a half-Indian woman president would have been difficult to imagine,” according to an editorial in The Indian Express.
But the U.S. election has been as much about a changing India as a changing America.
While India has followed the U.S. presidential race with a sense of pride in Harris — who was raised by an Indian mother and often traces the roots of her progressive values back to her family in the country — India has taken a more conservative turn since Harris’ childhood visits.
Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Hindu nationalism has been on the upswing. His government has scrapped special status for Kashmir, India’s only Muslim majority state, and enacted a new citizenship law that critics say discriminate against Muslims, among other new policies. Modi’s increasingly right-wing policies also translated into support for Donald Trump ahead of the 2020 election, and the two leaders enjoyed a close personal relationship during Trump’s presidency.
Although Indo-U.S. relations remained strong under the Biden administration — as Washington has courted India in the hopes it would become a counterweight to China in the region — there was less personal affinity between the two leaders. Harris generally avoided getting involved in Indo-U.S. affairs, but spoke out in support of Kashmiris after their special status was revoked in 2020, prompting ire from right-wing Indians.
In the U.S., the 5 million-strong Indian-American community has traditionally voted for Democratic candidates. But Modi’s previous endorsement of Trump and his own ultra-conservative politics seem to have affected political sentiment among this group. In a poll conducted in April and May, 21 percent of Indian respondents identified as Republicans, up from 16 percent in 2020 (47 percent identify as Democrats, down from 54 percent).
The group “Hindus for America First” is campaigning for Trump in swing states, criticizing Harris’ immigration policies, which they say have led to increased crime, and warning that she will appoint liberal judges to the Supreme Court. Trump, the group claims, would be better for Indo-U.S. relations.
So far, Modi — who was badly bruised in his own election this year, winning by only a slim margin — has steered clear of showing support for Trump. The U.S. presidential race is neck and neck and putting his weight behind a losing candidate could affect ties between the two largest democracies in the world.
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SAUMYA ROY is an author and social entrepreneur from Mumbai. She wrote about an Indian couple’s decade-long legal battle against “Love Jihad” for our Sex issue.
IRELAND
Jessica Traynor
This year’s U.S. election hasn’t grabbed Ireland’s imagination in the same way the 2020 race did. We are distracted by domestic issues. A state inquiry into religious-run schools has turned up more shocking evidence of decades of child abuse. Small but violent anti-immigration protests have broken out in several cities, flames fanned by our housing crisis and online misinformation and disinformation. And since last October, many have felt a growing sense of alienation from the U.S., as huge demonstrations in Ireland’s cities calling for a ceasefire in Gaza have highlighted the gulf between our nation’s attitudes to Palestine.
There’s still time, though. Ireland is invested in U.S. politics, by way of our diasporic relationship: Our celebration of the Kennedy legacy, our claiming of Barack Obama and our embracing of Joe Biden’s Mayo and Louth roots all indicate that our idea of an American president is a diaspora Democrat. This, of course, has never prevented our Taoiseach (head of state) from offering the traditional crystal bowl of shamrock to Republican presidents at the White House on St. Patrick’s Day.
Recent articles in the Irish Times and the Irish Independent, many reprinted from international newspapers, are gleefully supportive of Kamala Harris and the Democrats’ shock resurgence.
But two articles by Irish journalists, both published in the Irish Times in late August, are perhaps more indicative of our awareness of the real impact of U.S. politics on Ireland. In “What might the economic battle between Trump and Kamala Harris mean for Ireland?,” journalist Cliff Taylor addresses one of our national obsessions — Ireland’s 15 percent corporation tax. Trump’s intention to reduce U.S. corporate income tax to 15 percent for companies that make their products domestically would wipe out our advantage as a tax haven for U.S. companies, and negatively impact our lucrative tech sector. Harris’s stated aim to raise the corporate income tax rate to 28 percent is viewed favorably here, as is her more traditional approach to international trade.
Sports writer Denis Walsh’spiece, titled “Shameless Trump a dreadful embarrassment to the grand old game of golf” lambasts Trump’s cheating habits, both on and off the course, while demonstrating the Irish preoccupation with golf and the status it confers. The article’s jokey tone is underpinned by an anxiety that, should Trump lose to Harris, he might spend more time at Doonbeg, his golf resort in County Clare. Locals have welcomed the economic boost his celebrity has bestowed, but perhaps the national mood is more aptly surmised in Walsh’s dismissal of Trump as both man and golfer: “The U.S. presidential candidate doesn’t just play courses; he builds them, buys them, operates them, sues over them, lies about them, bullies with them and brags about them.”
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JESSICA TRAYNOR is a poet, essayist, and poetry editor at Banshee. Her piece on the cost of Ireland’s data centers was published in our Order issue.
SOUTH AFRICA
Eve Fairbanks
In South Africa, this year’s upcoming U.S. election has commanded little attention. This is a big change from 2016, when a fascination with Donald Trump swept the country. That year, a disproportionately white but still surprisingly racially diverse group of South Africans changed their Facebook profile pictures to a montage of the South African and American flags and an image of Trump with the caption, “My president!” When I posted a MAGA hat a Canadian friend had given me as a gag gift on Johannesburg’s Facebook Marketplace, I couldn’t keep up with the offers. Others, meanwhile, feared that the reality TV star’s economic isolationism and his rhetoric damning the developing world would drag South Africa into a fresh hell of poverty and social division.
This time around, though, the coverage of the U.S. election has been much more limited. In the middle of September, I got married in Cape Town. A number of American friends who flew out for the wedding expected to be grilled about the election. South Africans didn’t ask them about it — not out of propriety but out of indifference. Some came away disappointed. Why didn’t it matter?
Mostly, because the possibility that a Trump presidency would alter the U.S’s foreign and economic policies beyond recognition did not pan out. In 2018, the Trump administration, for instance, threatened to cut aid to South Africa in response to the country’s failure to support a U.S.-backed vote at the United Nations to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. But it never did. South Africans have come to view Trump’s America-first rhetoric as bluster, a U.S. soap opera destined for a domestic audience.
South Africa learned that although U.S. politics may appear turbulent, there is also a certain stasis and continuity from one administration to the next. That may also explain the lack of interest in Kamala Harris: When it comes to the things they care about — foreign aid, the U.S.-Chinese competition, attitudes toward the war in Gaza — South Africans don’t expect that much substantive policy change even under a Harris administration.
Unexpectedly, even South Africans who had feared Trump found that his first term was, in a sense, good for their country. After South Africa held an important election in May, a new populist political party, uMkhonto weSizwe, tried to dispute the results using a playbook directly lifted from Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 loss to Joe Biden. It failed completely, and South Africans seemed to find the attempt ridiculous. The response revealed their country’s independence from American political trends and illuminated the ways in which it was already charting a different and possibly better, more democratic path. Americans may do that kind of thing, the feeling went, but South Africans have the freedom to be different.
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EVE FAIRBANKS is a writer based in Johannesburg. She wrote about the dispossession of the Cape Town neighborhood of District Six for our Reparations issue and about what Elon Musk gets wrong about South Africa for our Fakes issue.
TAIWAN
Michelle Kuo
Who will come to Taiwan’s defense if China invades? Since moving here three years ago, I’ve been asked by people across the political spectrum: Do you, an American, think the United States would intervene on Taiwan’s behalf?
“I think America’s fickle,” I reply.
This answer resonates with just about everyone, including anti-American revanchists who believe it’s China’s turn to rule the world and leftist Taiwanese patriots who would rather die than be occupied by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Their shared skepticism has been bred by 40 years of “strategic ambiguity,” in which the U.S. creates uncertainty about whether it would intervene in a war.
Bipartisan support for Taiwan has grown in the U.S. in recent years, but both Trump and Biden have given mixed signals. When Biden told CBS’s “60 Minutes” that the U.S. would intervene if China invaded, the White House quickly walked back his statement. Trump is considered much more unpredictable still. In 2016, when he took a phone call from Taiwan’s president — the first time a sitting U.S. president had done so since 1979 — Taiwanese observers naively hoped he might be willing to take bold risks on the country’s behalf. Three years later, Trump praised Xi Jinping as “an incredible guy” and “a friend of mine.”
Taiwanese distrust of Trump has deepened since then. During this campaign, the former president said Taiwan should pay the U.S. for defense and that the country had taken “almost 100 percent” of the semiconductor industry from the U.S.
Kamala Harris, who has pledged to continue supporting Taiwan’s self-defense, is a more hopeful prospect. Taiwanese media widely covered Hong Kong activist Jeffrey Ngo’s remarks that he was “encouraged” by Harris’s selection of Tim Walz because of his outspoken criticism of China’s human rights abuses and his long-standing ties with Chinese dissidents.
Today, the Taiwanese — a people colonized by more countries than any other place in the world — seek freedom on their own terms. Taiwan now surpasses the U.S. and parts of Europe in protecting freedom of the press and assembly. It leads Asia in gender equality due to its high female participation in the legislature, and it’s one of the most progressive countries in the region on LGBTQ+ rights. Taiwanese people do not turn to the U.S. for democratic inspiration or a civilizing influence. But they do understand the field of power and they have internalized that most basic lesson of post-colonial studies: that colonized peoples must make complex choices within a limited set of options.
Xi Jinping’s government recently authorized the use of the death penalty to those asserting Taiwanese sovereignty. If the world must be unipolar, there’s no question that most Taiwanese people will choose America — that blustering, imperial, radically imperfect alternative to the limitless, dystopian cruelty of the CCP.
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MICHELLE KUO is a writer, visiting associate professor at the International College of Innovation at National Chengchi University, and editor-in-chief of Books from Taiwan. Her work has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Paris Review, and Public Books. Based in Taipei, she co-writes a newsletter called A Broad and Ample Road.
TURKEY
Kaya Genç
Since Joe Biden dropped out of the United States election race in July, the Turkish media, much of which is controlled by the government, has been eerily silent. Biden had been an easy target for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has distrusted the president ever since he told The New York Times editorial board in 2019 he intended to support the Turkish opposition in its goal “to take on and defeat Erdoğan. Not by a coup, not by a coup, but by the electoral process.”
Direct attacks on Biden’s vice president, now Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, are rare — if only because Turkish media has pivoted to a broad hatred of America. CNN Turk, once an impartial outlet, airs endless debates in which Erdoğan-friendly columnists, former generals and politicians scold the hypocrisy of the U.S. and its evil designs. Israel’s strikes in and around Gaza, which have killed thousands, have provided the necessary armament to such coverage, and anti-American feeling is palpable on the streets. In early September, nationalist activists assaulted U.S. Marines working on an American ship docked in Izmir.
There is no praise, either, for Donald Trump, whose full-throated support for Israel made him unpopular: “Trump chose his side, and met the genocide perpetrator Netanyahu,” read one pro-government headline. And yet, there is no doubt Erdoğan would prefer Trump in the Oval Office. Unlike the Democrats, Trump has never scolded Erdoğan for abandoning democracy. Trump’s breaking of democratic norms and cynical view of international institutions mirrors Erdoğan’s so closely that the Turkish strongman became one of Trump’s favorite autocrats during his presidency, alongside Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un.
Trump could also prove useful to Erdoğan’s party, the Justice and Development Party (AKP). After 22 years in power, the AKP’s popularity is on the wane, complicating its chances of success in the next elections in 2028. In March’s local elections, the party received the worst bashing in its history, and Turkey's constitution mandates that, having served as president for two terms, Erdoğan should not run for office again in 2028. His allies and cronies are not used to being out of power, and if they choose to play dirty and insist on extending Erdoğan’s reign for another half-decade, they might not receive much pushback from Trump, whose disrespect for democracy is clear. Indeed, Trump might even celebrate Erdoğan's iron fist.
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KAYA GENÇ, a European Press Prize finalist, is a novelist, art critic, and historian living in Istanbul. He wrote about a scheme to defraud Istanbul’s elite soccer players for our Sports issue.
✺ Published in “Issue 21: America” of The Dial
