Buckle up for America’s ugly election and faltering economy
The year ahead will be dominated by America’s presidential election and a global slowdown
TWO SUBJECTS will hog headlines around the world in 2020: America’s presidential-election campaign and the weakness of the global economy. Both will induce anxiety and each will influence the other. It will be a volatile year, characterised by unstable, angry and polarised politics, and an enfeebled economic outlook for the world, regardless of who wins on November 3rd, when American voters go to the polls.
Many elements of the election remain uncertain, from the impact of the impeachment trial that is all but certain to precede the head-t0-head presidential battle, to who will be the Democratic nominee to challenge President Donald Trump. But there seems little doubt that the tenor of the 2020 campaign will be uglier than any in modern American history. In 2016, already a notably nasty contest, a Trump presidency was a pinch-me prospect that too many people discounted; in 2020 millions of voters, on both sides, will feel the very fabric of their country’s democracy to be at stake. Outside America many more millions will wonder if an extraordinary four-year interlude is about to end, and whether the country that has been the anchor of the post-war world order has been irrevocably transformed.
