A new presidential mandate begins at the White House

Against the background of special security measures, the US outgoing president, Republican Donald Trump, has ended his mandate in Washington and has been succeeded by Democrat Joe Biden, who pledges that during his administration America will again be ready to assume the role of a world leader.

Pundits believe the new president will have to focus on the internal affairs as millions of Americans have been convinced by the outgoing president that the latest election was rigged. Although never proved, this allegation, repeatedly made by the one whose administration was characterized by a series of controversial statements and decisions, was the main cause for the violent events of January 6th, when five people were killed. 

The riot, which took place at the very heart of the world's democracy, at the United States Congress, stirred heated debates. In the wake of the Capitol riot the editor-in-chief of Radio France Internationale Romania, Ovidiu Nahoi, told Radio Romania that 'Donald Trump pledged to make America great again, but instead he has been making it smaller and smaller'. But what is the outcome of the aforementioned events and what we should expect from now on?

Ovidiu Nahoi: "First and foremost the new administration will need more time to reconcile America with itself - a very divided society. And America will not have the energy and time to get involved in major global issues, where the American values are needed. It will not have the time and the energy to get involved in these issues because America will get busy with domestic problems for a year or two, needing half of president Biden's mandate to say the least, to heal these internal wounds and reconcile with itself. So the country's influence at global level is going to shrink, that America, president Trump pledged to make great. And that influence and power started to wane right during the mandate of the outgoing president. So, that means a less powerful America whose commitment to getting involved in the world's major issues has diminished."

According to Kenneth Roth, director of New York-based Human Rights Watch, President Biden must restore his country's credibility on human rights at home and abroad, after what he said were four years of abuse of democratic principles. Speaking to Reuters before the release of the activist group's annual report, Kenneth Roth said that outgoing president Donald Trump had flouted human rights at home and been inconsistent in criticizing other countries' rights records. The outgoing president denied responsibility for the Capitol riot as well as the allegations on human rights abuse saying that the election was rigged to block two of his strategies known as 'Make America Great Again' and 'America First'.

The House of Representatives has accused Donald Trump of encouraging violence with his false claims of election fraud, thus becoming the first president in US history to be impeached twice. Roth has also called for Biden to re-engage with the United Nations' Human Rights Council, a Geneva forum which Trump quit in June 2018.

Focusing on several types of crisis - epidemiological, economic, climate or racial - several decisions of the new White House leader have been made and announced beforehand by the new administration in the first days of its mandate aimed at cancelling some of Trump's most controversial policies. These policies run on a wide spectrum ranging from denying some Muslim citizens access to the USA to the country's withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change.

Before his investiture Biden had presented a 1.9 trillion economic rescue package aimed at boosting the economy and stepping up the US response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Besides economic and health issues, the new US president must deal with the country's society gaps, pundits believe. According to professor Iulian Chifu, director of the Centre for Conflict Prevention, social cohesion in the US is at an all-time low, although we are speaking about a state, which along its history has seen slavery, segregation and racism.

Iulian Chifu: "We are in the situation when these gaps  have to be bridged, social cohesion must be restored while citizens must regain their confidence in institutions, democracy, justice and this can be done not only through political moves but through social surveys on the deeply-rooted causes of these gaps, by avoiding extremes - including from the other viewpoint of progressivism and the far-left - taking action while using a set of very important psychological instruments, at the same time providing support to all those who have been alienated by the excessive use of technology and by being kept away from the real society and public debates."

The beauty of democracy, the force of the democratic system resides in the ability to recompose itself, to relaunch itself and heal its own wounds, professor Chifu went on to say.

(bill)