US midterm elections offer lessons for Nigeria’s opposition

It is no longer news that the Republican Party lost the midterm elections in the US last week. It really ought not to have been newsworthy but for the toxic character of the incumbent president of the US. Midterm elections in America have long since turned into plebiscites on the performance of the sitting president.

This is the significance of the fact that the president’s party has lost in 19 of the last 22 midterm elections. But so horrible has Mr Trump been in office that a different outcome would have been hard to explain. No surprise, then, that pollsters called the outcome of the elections right this time.

What about democracy? It remains “the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time…”, according to Winston Churchill. This is true of democracy in Serbia as it is in Brazil and Hungary. Expectedly, Republicans will begin to struggle with Mr Trump’s legacy. Part of the effort will invest in dealing with the sharp ends of the pincer in which the Grand

Old Party now finds itself pinched. This rock and hard place are described, on one hand, by a lame-duck president whose legacy the party’s would-be presidential candidates would want to increase their distance from and by Mr Trump’s hold on the party’s grassroots activists, which grants him a veto on party primaries, on the other. There is much irony in the latter, though. For in exercising this veto in the run-up to Tuesday’s vote, Mr Trump put straw men up as his party’s candidates, and his MAGA movement proved too weak to lift any.

The Democrats, too, may well find their victory a poisoned chalice. For, in truth, they did not win the midterm elections. Mr Trump, whose net approval rating at the beginning of last week was at its lowest in 80 years for any president at this phase of his four-year term, lost it. In other words, a party still struggling to find its voice after the debacle of then-President Joe Biden’s failed attempt at re-election in 2024 suddenly finds itself at the fore and centre of America’s policymaking. It will matter that their majority in Congress is not big enough to override a presidential veto. But given the many ways in which the party splintered after Kamala Harris’s loss to Mr

Trump, on current form, the Democratic Party is likelier to tear itself apart from the inside in its battle to find answers to America’s many problems.

The party’s slight shift to the left will not help matters. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its promises and threats lend weight to concerns over the rising cost of living at the bottom of American society. Healthy economic growth (the envy of other rich economies, including China), coupled with inflation running ahead of wages, invites questions about how to offer the mass of the people a leg up without dampening the animal spirits that drive the US’s stellar performance across sectors. Added to these troubles is the fact that America has got to navigate this difficult path in a much-changed world.

Donald Trump is hardly responsible for China’s emergence as a rival to America’s global leadership. The promises of a more harmonious global space following the end of the Cold War always sounded too good to be true. Nonetheless, Russia’s much-lowered weight category (especially now that it is bent on punching above its weight) and America’s enhanced heft meant, at the very least, that the global institutions through which the world had managed itself since 1945 needed a facelift. A China with increased political and economic weight globally only makes this transition ever more urgent.

Mr Trump’s genius was to do a successful Guy Fawkes on these institutions. America will have to spearhead their repair and rebuilding. Russia cannot. Neither can China or the EU. And middle powers? Tut-tut. But the US cannot do this all by itself. It helps that from the United Nations Organisation to NATO, these institutions have spent time reflecting on possible directions for change. Whatever these alternatives might be, the lessons from Russia’s invasion of and continued war on Ukraine and China’s never-ending threat to forcibly annex Taiwan suggest that the route to a stable and economically resilient world does not pass through the whimsies and caprices of strongmen.

If this is the main lesson from Mr Trump and Binyamin Netanyahu’s needless war against Iran, then building coalitions that strengthen individual choice over the tyranny of collectives in a way that preserves universal human values is the new task before anyone with a stake in managing the global economy.

This is the challenge before the post-Trump era. And it is one that I doubt that either party in the US, as currently put together, can rise up to.

Uddin Ifeanyi, a journalist manqué and retired civil servant, can be reached @IfeanyiUddin