Mike Pence announced Wednesday his entry into the 2024 United States presidential election, as the former vice president goes up against his ex-boss Donald Trump for the Republican nomination.

The evangelical Christian is scheduled to appear at a campaign launch event the same day in the early-voting state of Iowa — joining an already crowded field that includes Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Trump’s closest competition.

“Today, before God and my family, I’m announcing I’m running for president of the United States,” he said in an online campaign video.

Pence’s announcement comes two days after papers filed with the US Federal Election Commission showed he had formally entered the race.

“I believe in the American people, and I have faith God is not done with America yet,” the 64-year-old wrote in a tweet accompanying the video.

“Together, we can bring this Country back, and the best days for the Greatest Nation on Earth are yet to come!”

Pence honed his reputation as an unstintingly loyal vice president who stuck with Trump throughout a scandal-plagued four years in the White House, and brought the religious right into the tent.

But he became a pariah in Trumpworld after rejecting the Republican leader’s demands that he overturn the 2020 election in his role as president of the Senate.

Berated constantly by Trump after Joe Biden’s election victory — and even heckled at a conservative conference with chants of “traitor!” — Pence continued to praise the tycoon in public.

That changed after Trump’s torrent of false claims of election fraud led to a mob chanting for Pence to be hanged at the US Capitol.

Pence announced his presidential run a day after former New Jersey governor Chris Christie joined the contest.

Former governors Nikki Haley and Asa Hutchinson are also in the race, while North Dakota’s chief executive Doug Burgum is also due to announce on Wednesday.

Polls show Trump as the overwhelming early front runner, regularly posting leads on DeSantis in excess of 30 points. None of the other candidates is achieving double figures.

But the former president is facing multiple criminal investigations into his personal and professional conduct that have already yielded dozens of felony charges in New York.

Source: AFP

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan defeated opposition challenger Kemal Kilicdaroglu in Sunday’s Turkish presidential election runoff – a victory analysts ascribe to Erdogan’s focus on identity issues and use of the government’s resources, as well as Kilicdaroglu’s tepid leadership of a precarious coalition.

The first round was a shock to many Western observers who thought they might finally see the back of Erdogan. But after the Turkish president came within a whisker of re-election in that ballot, his second-round victory surprised no one. He defeated opposition challenger Kemal Kilicdaroglu with 52.1 percent of the vote.

“I will be here until I’m in the grave,” Erdogan said as he addressed jubilant supporters from an open-top bus in Istanbul.

These polls belied the Western cliché that elections are about “the economy, stupid”. Along with his much-criticised response to February’s devastating earthquakes, Turkey’s economic woes looked like a big weakness for Erdogan at the outset of the campaign.

While growth remains robust, five years of an inflation and currency crisis has seen the cost of living soar for many Turks – a major reversal after the abundant economic gains after Erdogan first took power in 2003. Experts blame this crisis on Erdogan’s unorthodox belief that cutting interest rates helps reduce inflation while all mainstream economic theories hold that higher interest rates are required to calm rampant inflation in an economy.

Identity politics

But culture war has been at the heart of Turkish politics ever since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk made the country a modern nation-state in 1923, introducing strict secularism as he transformed Turkey along Westernising lines. Erdogan’s traditional constituency of socially conservative Muslim voters in the Anatolian heartland have always seen him as their champion in this culture war. A gifted orator and political strategist, Erdogan has already gone down in history as the leader who smashed secular Kemalism’s long hegemony over Turkish politics.

“Erdogan won primarily because he was once again able to shift the focus from socio-economic issues to identity issues,” said Ozgur Unluhisarcikli, director of the German Marshall Fund’s Ankara bureau.

Erdogan also instrumentalised Turkey’s long fight against Kurdish militant group the PKK, which has waged a guerrilla war against the Turkish state punctuated by ceasefires since 1984 and is classified as a terrorist group by the EU and the US as well as Turkey.

Kilicdaroglu won the support of the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP). Erdogan then accused the opposition of having links to terrorism, saying opposition leaders went into “dark rooms to sit and bargain” with militants.

“He was particularly successful in directing the anger of Turkish society towards the PKK [against] the opposition,” Unluhisarcikli noted.

Meanwhile, Kilicdaroglu’s big-tent approach was always going to be a tremendous challenge. The opposition contender had to juggle the Nation Alliance – the heterogenous six-party coalition behind his candidacy, which included the nationalist Good Party – with the HDP’s endorsement of his candidacy.

After Kilicdaroglu’s disappointing first-round performance, he won the support of the nationalist Victory Party’s Umit Ozdag and adopted his hard line on the Kurdish issue – which evidently risked alienating the millions of Kurdish voters Kilicdaroglu needed.

“The diversity of the opposition alliance was both an advantage and a disadvantage,” Unluhisarcikli observed. “It was an advantage because it made it possible for Kilicdaroglu to address a wider audience. It was a disadvantage because it led to an image of dysfunctionality. Moreover, while most voters could find an element they could identify with in the opposition alliance, they could also find one that they could not tolerate.”

When he was performing well in opinion polls ahead of the first round, Kilicdaroglu’s unassuming, professorial demeanour looked like a potential boon after two decades of Erdogan’s often mercurial style. But in reality Kilicdaroglu’s image was that of a “lacklustre candidate” backed by a “wobbly coalition”, said Howard Eissenstat, a Turkey specialist at St. Lawrence University and the Middle East Institute in Washington DC.

‘Authoritarian reasons’

Beyond the issues and personalities, Erdogan was able to mobilise resources surpassing the typical advantages of incumbency. He made lavish offers to voters using the state’s largesse, notably promising discounted gas bills for a year. Erdogan’s presidential power was helpful to his campaign in other ways, as the government controls 90% of the national media and has effectively curtailed the power of the independent press, seeing Turkey fall to 165 out of 180 in the World Press Freedom Index.

Highlighting restrictions on press freedom, observers from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe found during the campaign that the polls were “marked by an unlevel playing field” even if they were “still competitive”.

“There are electoral reasons why Erdogan won and there are authoritarian reasons why he won,” Eissenstat said, emphasising that both sides of this equation are crucial.

“Given Erdogan’s gross mismanagement of the economy, his electoral skills would mean little without the authoritarian components: his control of 90% of the media, his use of the courts to limit the opposition, his use of government resources to support his own campaign,” Eissenstat continued. “As the saying goes, ‘only amateurs try to steal elections on election day’: Erdogan is no amateur. Election day had some irregularities, but nothing wildly out of the ordinary. Erdogan controlled every aspect of how the election was [run] and that is the key explanation for why he won.”

All that said, Kilicdaroglu came closer to defeating Erdogan than any previous opposition standard-bearer. In the 2018 presidential elections many Western observers thought Muharrem Ince had a decent chance of winning. But Erdogan clinched re-election in the first round, despite a lively campaign from the candidate representing Kilicdaroglu’s Republican People’s Party.

“The second round was closer than I thought it would be,” Eissenstat said. “The opposition did very well given the limits it was working under, and the voter turnout was higher than I expected.”

“I am in Turkey right now and my sense from conversations before the run-off [was] that opposition voters were demoralised and that many would stay home,” Eissenstat continued. “In the event, the Turkish electorate’s belief in the moral importance of voting trumped their hopelessness. The exception was the Kurdish vote, which clearly was dampened by Kilicdaroglu’s swerve to the right in the second round.”

Potential successors?

But there is no mistaking the sense of jubilation among Erdogan and his supporters as he enters his third decade in power. This year is symbolic, too, as Turkey is marking a century since Ataturk made it a nation-state.

Beneath the congratulations pouring in from Washington to Moscow, there is a clear divide between the perspectives of Western governments and those of Turkey’s geopolitical partners, pre-eminently Russia. After the Western commentariat hailed Erdogan as a reformer in the 2000s, their attitudes soured during the following decade, as he ramped up an assertive foreign policy amid his turn towards illiberal democracy at home.

How the West, Russia see Turkey’s presidential elections

Russia will “celebrate” Erdogan’s victory as Moscow sees his “transactionalism as convenient” – while “for the West, he will continue to be a challenge, but they will try to make the best of it”, Eissenstat said. “They won’t be happy, but in the end, they want to work with Turkey and Erdogan is its president.”

On foreign and domestic policy alike, Eissenstat expects Erdogan is unlikely to make any major changes during this new presidential term.

“He will likely make some half-hearted nods at a reset with some Western powers and with the markets to try to help stabilise the economy, but I think the general trajectory of his rule is set,” Eissenstat said. “I don’t expect him to become wildly more repressive and I certainly don’t expect him to liberalise.”  

Nevertheless, both analysts foresee one key difference in the 69-year-old Erdogan’s third term: he’s likely to hand-pick his political successor.

Source: AFP

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad received an invitation to next week’s Arab summit in Saudi Arabia, the presidency said Wednesday, the first such invitation since the country’s war began in 2011.

Assad received an invitation from Saudi King Salman “to participate in the thirty-second Arab League summit, which will be held in Jeddah on May 19”, the Syrian presidency said in a statement.

Assad said the summit “will enhance joint Arab action to achieve the aspirations of the Arab peoples,” the statement added.

Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Jordan, Nayef bin Bandar al-Sudairi, delivered the invitation.

On Sunday, the Arab League welcomed back Syria’s government, securing Assad’s return to the Arab fold after years of isolation.

The pan-Arab body suspended Damascus in November 2011 over its crackdown on protests that spiralled into a war that has killed more than 500,000 people, displaced millions and battered the country’s infrastructure and industry.

The last Arab League summit Assad attended was in 2010 in Libya.

The invitation comes a day after Riyadh and Damascus announced that work would resume at their respective diplomatic missions in Syria and Saudi Arabia, after more than a decade of severed ties.

Assad had been politically isolated in the region since the war began, but a flurry of diplomatic activity has been underway in recent weeks after a decision by arch-rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran, a close ally of Damascus, to resume ties shifted the political landscape.

Source: AFP

US President Joe Biden has confirmed he’s seeking re-election with Vice President Kamala Harris as his running mate in 2024

Aged 80, Biden is already the oldest US president in history and would be 86 at the end of a second term, a cause of concern for some voters

Biden launched his campaign on social media early Tuesday morning, with a three-minute video that begins with a one-word pitch: freedom

Republicans were clearly ready for this. Soon after the launch, the party released a statement calling the Democrat “out of touch” for seeking re-election and claiming US citizens were counting down the days until they can send him “packing”

Donald Trump has already launched his bid for the Republicans, meaning the pair could be set for a rematch of the 2020 election in November 2024 – but there are still many candidates to declare.

Source: BBC

After months of teasing, President Joe Biden is expected finally to announce his bid for a second term Tuesday, defying lukewarm polls and, at 80, boldly pushing what were once considered age boundaries for one of the planet’s most stressful jobs.

Neither the White House, the Democratic Party nor the president himself have confirmed he will announce but multiple US media reports, citing unnamed sources, say the move will come early Tuesday in a video address.

This would fall exactly four years after Biden announced his candidacy for the 2020 election in which he defeated Donald Trump. That too was made in the low-key format of a video, as was Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign announcement.

By contrast, Trump formally launched his bid for a second term in 2019 at one of his signature rallies.

The 76-year-old Republican has also already announced his bid for a 2024 comeback and is the strong frontrunner to be his party’s nominee, despite having been criminally indicted and remaining under multiple other investigations on serious allegations.

Biden’s Tuesday schedule currently features an address on the economy at a Washington hotel conference room.

While not a campaign event, the scheduled theme — “how his investing in America agenda is bringing manufacturing back, rebuilding the middle class, and creating good-paying union jobs” — is clearly set to be at the heart of the Democrat’s 2024 message.

In the evening, Biden and First Lady Jill Biden will visit Washington’s Korean War Memorial along with South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and his wife Kim Keon Hee, as they kick off a state visit — and give Biden an opportunity to highlight his foreign policy record.

Low enthusiasm

History shows that as the incumbent, Biden would have an immediate advantage.

Trump, dragged down by his management of the Covid-19 pandemic and fears among Democrats that he was a threat to democracy, was the first sitting president in three decades to lose re-election.

Biden is also presiding over a powerful post-pandemic economic revival — usually a key factor in deciding presidential elections.

However, Biden faces unique headwinds. Chief among these is worry over his age.

He’d be 82 when he began his second term and 86 when he left office. At 80, he is already the oldest person ever in the Oval Office.

An official medical report this year found Biden to be physically in good condition.

But the president’s noticeably slow walk — notwithstanding his habit of throwing in a few steps at a jog — and his frequent moments of becoming tongue tied during public speaking have spooked even supporters.

An NBC News poll released over the weekend found that 70 percent of Americans, including 51 percent of Democrats, believe he should not run for a second term. Forty eight percent cited concerns over his age as the main reason and another 21 percent cited that as a minor reason.

Among those raising strong doubts over Biden’s fitness to serve another grueling four years after this term ends was The New York Times editorial board last week.

“The president also needs to talk about his health openly and without embarrassment, and to end the pretense that it doesn’t matter,” it said.

Asked about the issue, Biden always replies “watch me” — explaining that voters should look not at his age but his record of delivering several historic investment bills, leading a coalition to support Ukraine against Russian invasion, and other achievements during a drama-filled first term.

Source: AFP