Trump is nominated - and remains divisive
Donald Trump was elected as presidential candidate at the Republican convention in Cleveland - despite loud protestations by a group of delegates. Commentators describe the nomination as a Republican debacle and express concern about the state of US politics.
The downfall of the traditional parties
US Republicans face the same fate as the traditional parties in Europe, the daily paper La Stampa observes:
“With the Republican debacle, the new brand of politics that derailed both the Tories and Labour and led to Brexit in the UK, that has enabled Le Pen to corner the Socialists and the Gaullists in France and that has Grillo dominating Berlusconi and the belligerent Democrats in Italy has been exported to the US. The traditional parties are floundering in view of negligible economic growth rates and lost jobs that must somehow be replaced in a digital economy. Meanwhile the populists are loudly churning out the fairytales the unhappy voters love to hear. So don't laugh at the eccentric blunders made by Trump and his picturesque family. The wave of paranoid politics they proclaim is already rolling over Europe and, as Martin Wolf reflected bitterly in the Financial Times, 'our civilisation itself is at stake'.”
Trump in the Muppet Show
For Jacek Żakowski writing in news magazine Polityka the US presidential election campaign is a negative trend that is having harmful repercussions for the whole world:
“Now the Americans face a choice between a rock and a hard place in November, given that Barack Obama has already had problems getting Congress to do what he wants and Hillary Clinton is likely to be even less successful. Trump, on the other hand, poses a different problem: if he becomes US president and meets the head of British diplomacy, Boris Johnson, on the political stage it would be like watching the Muppet Show as far as I'm concerned. This shows how unprofessional the politics of even the major international powers has become - now, at a time when the international situation is so worrying. And it seems that the worst possible scenario for the West [Trump winning] could well happen.”
US politics rotten to the core
The future course of the US election campaign seems fairly predictable - but this means a critical approach is more important than ever, the Berliner Zeitung insists:
“Who is speaking, and more importantly who is not speaking and keeping away from the party convention? Among the latter are several well-known Republicans who show that Trump is also polarising his own party. ... Why is it that in America of all places, a key symbol of democratic values, it is no longer surprising that the wife of an ex-president has the best chances of pushing through her candidacy simply because of her contacts, power mechanisms and access to funding. That once again the Bush dynasty was able to send one of its sons into the running and that under 'normal' circumstances, i.e. without Trump, he might have even been successful? In spite of all the surprises that Donald Trump has delivered, these facts should make us much more surprised than they often do.”