Eagle in a spot

Thursday 5th November 2020

The US presidential election has gone right down to the wire. However, speaking from the White House, President Donald J. Trump declared victory even before several key battleground states were called. Claiming that there had been an electoral fraud, he said he had made that prediction before the election, and it had come true. He said: “Frankly, we did win this election … We want the law to be used in a proper manner, so we’ll be going to the US Supreme Court.” He made that declaration in spite of having denied, on Sunday, reports that he was planning to declare victory prematurely. He may have been worried that some of the states where he was leading were slow in releasing the results. Trump is busy preparing the ground for a legal battle in case of defeat. Republican presidential candidate Joe Biden also claimed he was going to win.

The US presidential election was not expected to be on a knife edge. It was thought that the winner would emerge early in the race with an unassailable lead. But nothing is so certain as the unexpected in politics. Pollsters expected the Democrats to turn the Lone Star State blue and gain a turbo boost earlier in the race, but that was not to be. Trump bagged it easily. Something similar happened in Florida. Biden, however, won California comfortably and secured 55 electoral votes. Finally, the nail-biter election was down to the Rust Belt states.

It is a sad day for US democracy. Incumbent President not only made a declaration of victory prematurely but also delegitimised the entire election; he also stands accused of trying to disenfranchise millions of voters on some flimsy pretext. Trump outperformed the pollsters’ predictions in several key states including Texas, as he did in 2016, and if he secures a second term, he will have his work cut to legitimise his victory as he has already declared that the election was marred by a fraud.

Trump bashers including some American media outlets have said what he did on the election night is without precedent in the US. True, the Founding Fathers of America must be spinning in their graves. Moreover, how can the US seize moral high ground and pontificate to the world on the virtues of free and fair elections, hereafter. How would Washington have reacted if what is unfolding in the US had happened in a country in the Global South? Its ambassador there would have issued strongly-worded media statements, urging the government concerned to ensure free and fair polls and respect the people’s verdict. The Zeus of democracy has feet of clay!

Sri Lanka draws fire at all western-dominated international fora for ‘attacks on democracy’, and many western polls observers converge here in their numbers to see if elections are conducted in a free and fair manner. But the self-proclaimed defenders of global democracy should learn from the exemplary manner in which those who lost the last two presidential elections here conducted themselves. They conceded defeat gracefully. In 2015, the then incumbent President Mahinda Rajapaksa threw in the towel hours before the final result of the election was officially announced. In 2019, Sajith Premadasa conceded defeat without waiting till the official announcement of the final result. In so doing, both leaders won the admiration of the public. None of the presidential candidates in this country have publicly declared victory before the announcement of the final results.

When the current mess is cleaned up on the electoral front and the winner in the presidential race determined, the biggest challenge before the US will be to restore public confidence in its electoral process, and, above all, prove that it has a moral right to tell other countries how to conduct elections.