
In an interview, Professor of Applied Methods and Comparative Politics Mark Kayser comments on what the election results mean for Germany and Europe.
After a heated election cycle, Donald Trump clinched his bid for US President this week, plunging the world, not least Europe, into uncertainty. We talked to Professor of Applied Methods and Comparative Politics Mark Kayser about the election and what the results mean for Germany and European security.
Hi Mark, thanks for talking to me today. How are you feeling at the moment?
I’m feeling fatalistic. I’m here in Berlin right now, and there’s a feeling of wasted opportunity at an important time in Germany. There was a realistic prospect that this could happen, and what did the German government do to prepare for the possibility of another Trump presidency?
Germany has lived under the US security umbrella since the Second World War ended, and now it has an unreliable security partner. It should have been preparing for this. Four years since the last US presidential election, it has become stunningly obvious that security is a major concern, with an increasingly aggressive Russia at our doorstep. But what has happened since the Zeitenwende? Very little – nothing on a scale that approaches what’s necessary.
The world of Pax Americana, in which the US was the biggest guarantor of a rules-based order, one in which Germany has prospered, is disappearing. There is a leadership vacuum in the liberal democratic world. And for us in Europe, there’s the security issue of an increasingly aggressive Russia that wants to take us back to the 19th century where military intervention was a common and expected approach to settling grievances. It’s a scary and more dangerous world now than it was yesterday.
How do you rate the campaign strategies of both presidential candidates? Where did Harris go wrong?
Part of Trump’s campaign strategy was to lock on to voter grievances. He doubled down on the young male vote, recognising that young males without higher education have done much less well over the last decades, whereas minorities for example are better off. A lot of the jobs males without a higher education used to prosper from have disappeared, and unions have been eroded. Trump highlighted these grievances, just as he did grievances around inflation, which hurt everyone, but especially people living paycheck to paycheck.
With the Harris campaign, there was a blown opportunity. At a time in which people were unhappy with the status quo, she had the opportunity to cast herself as the ‘change’ candidate, and she failed. When asked in an interview about what she would do differently from Biden, she said ‘nothing’. People were looking for change, and she failed to grasp the mantle as the ‘change’ candidate.
In the end they really ran on Trump as a threat to democracy, and it’s not clear if voters care about democracy more than real things, like the price of groceries.
Do you see any glimmers of hope in all this?
Actually, right now what I want to talk about are risks.
The single biggest concern is whether the House of Representatives goes to the Republicans (which, as of today and as reported by AP, continues to hang in the balance with dozens of races left to be called).
From Germany’s perspective, once they get their own government fixed*, the next effective government will really have to coordinate with other European powers, especially larger powers including the UK and France, and bring others along with it, like the Scandinavian countries, to look into creating their own security umbrella if they can’t trust NATO.
And what we’re likely to see, shortly after Trump takes office, is pressure on Ukraine. The question is, can Europe step in and fill that vacuum? Even if they can do it financially, it’s not clear if they have the military clout.
If Europe wants to influence the world around them and resist Russian aggression, they have to support Ukraine. And the extent to which they do this is critical. This is Europe’s moment.
*This conversation took place on 6 November as US election results were still coming in and shortly before Germany’s coalition government collapsed, following Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s dismissal of Finance Minister Christian Lindner of the FDP and the FDP's subsequent withdrawal from the coalition.
Views expressed by the interviewee may not necessarily reflect the views and values of the Hertie School.
More about our expert
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Mark Kayser, Professor of Applied Methods and Comparative Politics