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The historic result of the American midterm elections opens a completely new chapter for the remainder of Donald Trump’s second term.
On the domestic front, the American president now finds himself markedly weakened by a defeat that reads first and foremost as a referendum against him personally, his methods and his record.
The consequences of the election are enduring: the newly elected senators are chosen for six years and will sit until the end of Donald Trump’s presidency, but also throughout the entire following presidential term.
The midterm results are also very important for Europe.
Institutionally first, the Democrats now have the means in Congress to exercise far tighter oversight of Donald Trump’s actions, even if the executive branch is less constrained by the Constitution in foreign and military affairs than on domestic issues.
Then, more fundamentally and in the long term, the election demonstrates the resilience and vitality of American democracy (already illustrated by the role of checks and balances over the past two years), in many respects: the high turnout, the way the elections were conducted without violence or disruption, the President’s acceptance of the results, the diversity and novelty of the profiles of the elected candidates (not only for Congress, but also in the positions of governors, for example), the inability of large sums of private money spent in campaigns by billionaires such as Elon Musk or Vivek Ramaswamy to weigh on the results.
Finally, this new balance in Congress offers unprecedented opportunities for Europe, provided it makes innovative proposals, even if it means revisiting some of its own references, and scales up to address the magnitude of the challenges.
Des garanties institutionnelles à construire
On the future of the transatlantic relationship, it is first up to the Americans, and to the new majority in Congress, to restore trust. Europeans, like all traditional partners of the United States, can rightly doubt the value of tightening ties with a country that has entrusted Donald Trump with supreme powers on two occasions.
Certainly, given the scale of their outcomes, these results could hint at the defeat of his successors in the presidential election due in two years.
But it cannot be ruled out that one of them, inspired by his methods and his approach to power, will one day reach the White House. The fractures in the United States that explain the political emergence of Donald Trump developed over more than a generation. Diminishing them will take more than one presidential term, as Joe Biden’s presidency has shown.
The new context stemming from the midterms, but also the reflections underway in the United States on the necessary strengthening of institutions to prevent authoritarianism, nonetheless makes possible the emergence of new solutions and guarantees for Europeans and for United States partners.
Let us take trade policy, an area in which Donald Trump forced Europe to bend with a highly unbalanced agreement, unprecedented for the European Union: the Constitution entrusts this competence to Congress.
Europeans, like all traditional partners of the United States, can rightly doubt the value of tightening ties with a country that has entrusted Donald Trump with supreme powers on two occasions.
Renaud Lassus
Trump was able to act by relying on delegations of powers in the field of tariffs, conferred by texts often old, some revived from oblivion by Robert Lighthizer, his trade representative during his first term. If the Supreme Court recently opposed the president on the way he implemented these delegations, it did not condemn their use as such. During his first term, the president had already done a lot of harm to European interests, particularly French, by activating them, without exceeding the framework.
Today it becomes possible to address these risks structurally for the future. The Congress can amend these delegations to compel the executive to obtain its consent before instituting trade measures against US allies. There is already a precedent. Before becoming Secretary of State, when he was a Florida senator, Marco Rubio had a provision adopted prohibiting the president from leaving NATO without prior Congressional approval.
The Congress will also undertake institutional work to strengthen the oversight of executive powers and to prevent authoritarian risks in the future. A process briefly begun in 2021, after the Capitol attack, will resume on a broad front: the president’s clemency power, including toward himself, the scope and limits of his authority over independent federal agencies, the obligation for the executive to implement the budgetary decisions voted by Congress, his power of nomination, all of which are domains in which Donald Trump tried to free himself from democratic norms.
In such a context, proposals aimed at constraining the executive to guarantee predictability, quality and stability of relations with US allies will find a favorable reception in Congress.
Ce que les démocrates reprochent à l’Europe
If the first steps to restore trust must come from Americans, Europeans, for their part, should not overlook the Democrats’ perception of a marked decline in their image among them.
Many influential Democratic figures indeed believe that the Union has shown far less demanding and critical toward Donald Trump than toward Joe Biden. They point out that when adopting the largest climate package ever voted in the United States (the Inflation Reduction Act), European countries, which had criticized American inaction, reacted negatively, denouncing unilateral and protectionist provisions, before becoming much more discreet about Donald Trump’s climate policy.
They also argue that the Union refused to engage with Joe Biden in industrial policy rapprochements, arguing that American proposals did not comply with international trade law, to end up in Turnberry with Donald Trump signing a highly unbalanced bilateral agreement, openly contrary to WTO principles.
In Congress, and in the White House if they regain it in two years, the Democrats will also place the relationship with China at the center of their agenda with the Union, as a strategic issue, even as a prerequisite to the rest of the dialogue.
On this point too, the disappointment toward Europe runs deep. Democrats did not understand why, during Joe Biden’s term, the Union kept its distance from the American policy and trade agenda toward China.
While acknowledging the central responsibility of the United States in the heavy misjudgment that sought the integration of China into international exchanges to make it more democratic at home and less nationalist abroad, they believe that the Union refused to share this diagnosis for ideological reasons, tied to its commitment to the liberalization of trade.
Many Democratic officials believe that the Union has shown far less demanding and critical toward Donald Trump than toward Joe Biden.
Renaud Lassus
One legal dossier, little known in Europe, has weighed heavily in this distancing, especially since a large portion of the Democratic elite are jurists by training: the European Commission’s support, in the name of defending multilateralism, for the rulings of the WTO Appellate Body, including when it refused to treat Chinese state-owned enterprises as public entities in a dispute over subsidies, on the grounds that they did not exercise governmental authority, an interpretation not found in WTO texts.
Chine, climat: les terrains d’une coopération nouvelle
The hardening of the Union’s stance against China’s economic, commercial and monetary practices now appears to open the door to new cooperation.
With more than a decade of lag behind the United States, European countries that had been the least resolute toward Chinese mercantilism, such as Germany, now seem to likewise judge that the level reached by subsidies, overcapacity in production, and loss-leader strategies by Chinese firms threatens the viability of European industries, the social and productive fabric, and, ultimately, the political stability of democracies.
Moreover, the social and political acceptance of the energy transition, already complex and difficult, would be doomed to fail in Europe and in America if the fight against climate change ended up with the dominance of Chinese monopolies, the disappearance of entire sectors, and dependence on Chinese companies capable of halting deliveries for political leverage.
For their part, the Democrats will seek to resume their strategy of reindustrialization for the benefit of the less advantaged regions, through broad investments in environmental and climate measures, to improve the living conditions of American working classes, and to address the social and political fragilities that fed Donald Trump’s political ascent.
It is therefore particularly on these issues that the resumption of transatlantic cooperation could focus immediately.
In climate matters, the United States and the European Union had not been able to agree, at the end of Biden’s term, on a joint approach to imports based on their carbon content, in sectors such as steel and aluminum. The Union could propose resuming these discussions.
More broadly, the Union has established a carbon border adjustment mechanism. In the United States, bills introduced in Congress, including with the support of Republican senators, share the same vision; blocked by the Trump administration, they could now advance. A foundational rapprochement could be undertaken.
Even more ambitiously, the United States and the European Union could jointly work on a project for a customs union, covering the most important products for the energy transition (electric vehicles, solar panels, batteries, etc.). In these sectors, the United States and Europe would implement in a coordinated manner (with the involvement of other states willing to join) the same instruments (anti-dumping duties, anti-subsidy measures) toward third countries that subsidize their own production massively.
The Americans have a vital interest in ensuring that the European economy does not disappear under Chinese pressure; the Europeans, for their part, have an interest in anchoring their renewed resolve toward China in contractual agreements with other countries like the United States, because it is not certain that they will find the necessary firmness within themselves to face Chinese threats. This customs union would provide a systemic leverage commensurate with the stakes.
Lever les obstacles, des deux côtés de l’Atlantique
The obstacles to a transatlantic rapprochement remain substantial nonetheless. Donald Trump remains in power for two more years. There is now a deep legacy. There are many uncertainties on both sides of the Atlantic.
We must however distinguish true obstacles from mental barriers (and sometimes from a lack of imagination) that may exist on the European side.
A frequently advanced argument in Europe is that Europeans should keep their distance from the United States and from its political, economic, social system, fundamentally unpredictable, unstable, unequal, dominated by the influence of private money, and marked by internal violence in its approach to the world.
These assessments are valid and rest on undeniable elements. But they reflect only part of the American reality and history. The elections have just shown the resilience of American democracy.
Moreover, in the current climate of doubt and uncertainty, the emergence of new and positive perspectives within a democracy, especially in the United States, holds major interest for all others. Democratic fractures, in Europe as in America, rest on largely shared social, political, technological, cultural, and territorial foundations, which call for joint reflections and responses.
The Americans have a vital interest that the European economy does not disappear under Chinese pressure.
Renaud Lassus
In other words, the citizens of Europe who seek to strengthen their democracies have every interest in maintaining and developing their ties with Americans who share their vision, and translating that into concrete proposals, especially at a moment when they have just secured such a clear victory in Congress.
Many will, however, in Europe, think that the Democratic Party and the Americans have other priorities than Europe as they seek to move beyond the Trump era. The context, however, has never been so favorable, provided that Europeans understand the sequence of American developments that is opening and manage to align themselves with it.
Many Democrats thus consider that American democracy cannot alone address certain essential causes of fragility currently affecting it, such as the impact of the Internet and social networks on the democratic contract and the public sphere, the agora where ideas are exchanged in democracy (fake news, digital polarization, the disproportionate influence of social media proprietors, online manipulations, etc.).
They believe that, on these questions, they need other democracies, especially in Europe. This situation is unprecedented and very different from earlier periods when American Democrats (the Clinton era, the Obama era) believed that what was good for America was, to a large extent, good for the rest of the world (“the Washington consensus”). Today, Maryland Democrat Jamie Raskin, who will take the chairmanship of the House Judiciary Committee in place of Republican Jim Jordan, one of the MAGA figures in Congress, is calling for a conversation among democracies about their shared challenges.
The political developments in Europe, particularly in France and Germany, will also be decisive for the future of the transatlantic relationship. The deep reluctance, and even principled opposition to deepening the transatlantic agenda, could however come as much from the United States, including certain components of the Democratic Party, whose elected officials face contradictory influences regarding the regulation of large digital companies.
The context has nonetheless never been so favorable, provided that Europeans understand the sequence of American developments that is opening and manage to align themselves with it.
Renaud Lassus
The founders or leaders of these companies will now actively seek to move closer to the Democrats after two years of alliance with Donald Trump. As they did with Donald Trump, they will lobby Congress for an offensive against European regulation of the Internet and artificial intelligence.
The hesitations of Gavin Newsom, outgoing Governor of California and a likely candidate for the next presidential election, toward the plan to tax very large fortunes in his state (which was rejected by a referendum on the day of the midterms), or the recent abandonment by Rob Bonta, California’s Attorney General, of an antitrust action targeting Warner Bros.’ acquisition by Paramount, in favor of a settlement strongly criticized by other Democrats, remind us that the influence of large monopolies is a structural phenomenon that transcends partisan divides in the United States.
That is why it is all the more essential to formulate proposals, so as not to leave the field to the sole partisans, on both sides of the Atlantic, of an agenda of opposition, or even confrontation, between European and American democracies.