(Trends Wide) — It’s the season for political comebacks, and don’t think former US President Donald Trump isn’t looking.
Twice in two days, in Brazil and Israel, former world leaders who just can’t give up that tantalizing taste of political ambition have moved on the cusp of a return to power. Past scandals, their own treacherous political and legal nightmares don’t stop them from recreating that dream of past glory. Trump would love to follow a similar path.
Both former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have shown that time out of power could be a springboard for unlikely political rebounds.
This may be a hopeful sign for Trump, who has seized on next week’s midterms as a display of his own power within the GOP, anointing a crop of nominees who promote his falsehoods about 2020 voter fraud.
Trump has left no doubt that he is eager to mount another presidential campaign, not just because he misses the spotlight. He possibly sees a new run for the White House as a shield against possible indictment in various criminal investigations.
“I’ll probably have to do it again,” Trump told supporters at a rally in Texas last month, referring to the possibility of his third presidential campaign, which would build on his still-high GOP popularity but could sink. in his much more uncertain position among a broader general electorate.
American presidents defeated after a single term have generally faded into history pretty quickly. Trump would need to emulate a feat accomplished only once before, by President Grover Cleveland, who lost the 1888 election only to return to the White House after taking revenge on President Benjamin Harrison after his victory four years later.
The art of political comeback
Israeli Netanyahu, one of Trump’s closest friends on the international stage, would love to get the band back together with Trump.
On Tuesday, the former prime minister, first elected in 1996 and who has dominated Israeli politics for much of the past quarter-century, was on the verge of a surprising second comeback as initial exit polls suggested he he could have won a narrow majority in another election in a politically divided nation.
And on Sunday in Brazil, Lula da Silva narrowly defeated President Jair Bolsonaro in a runoff election. While Trump probably would have preferred the opposite outcome since Bolsonaro is something of a protégé, the leftist’s victory showed that former presidents can have second moves.
Like Trump, Lula da Silva, a former two-term president of Brazil, has had his run-ins with legal authorities. In fact, her long and tortuous road to a political comeback was diverted through a partial prison sentence for alleged corruption. The annulment of his sentences by the Supreme Court authorized him to run again.
It was feared that Bolsonaro would emulate his American alter ego and covid-19 mask-shunning fellow by refusing to accept the result of an election that left him out of power after a single term. But while he hasn’t conceded, the man known as “The Trump of the Tropics” says he will abide by the constitution and has so far not resorted to inciting an insurrection to try to keep his job. But it is unlikely that he will leave: he lost the election by a very narrow margin, his political movement remains strong and, like Trump, he may be looking to the future.
Netanyahu and Lula da Silva are not the only past successes who have tried to pave their way back to power. In Italy, three-time former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi is back in parliament after a tax fraud scandal, though his bid to play king in coalition talks fizzled out after he boasted of his ties to his old friend, Russian President Vladimir Putin, who also happens to be a hero to Trump.
Like Lula da Silva and Netanyahu, Trump enjoys the fervent support of his loyal supporters who are undeterred by his run-ins with the law.
Lula da Silva walked out of jail a hero to his supporters, after a year and a half of a 12-year sentence for corruption and money laundering imposed in 2018.
Netanyahu, however, remains embroiled in his own corruption trial and faces one count of bribery and three counts of fraud and breach of trust in three separate investigations. He has taken a distinctly Trumpian approach to his plight, calling the investigations a “witch hunt” and an “attempted coup” and, like the former US president, has raised questions about the legitimacy of the judiciary. .
As he travels the world, President Joe Biden has been telling his allies that “America is back” or, in other words, that the disruptive Trump administration that alienated allies and watched the American president snuggle with dictators has finished.
Yet many foreign diplomats, as they look at the vitriol and division in the United States and the strength of Trump with his base, not to mention the state-level candidates he has promoted this year who could oversee the 2024 election, are wondering how long they can bet on the more traditional and multilateral brand of stable American leadership that Biden is trying to restore. Even if Trump doesn’t run in 2024, the power of his movement is so strong in the GOP that a potential future Republican president would likely share his populist, nationalist and “America First” instincts.
The comeback that failed
Still, the road back is not always kind to populist leaders who have fallen from power. Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has just seen his attempt to reclaim 10 Downing Street thwarted after the brief but disastrous tenure of his successor, Liz Truss.
Johnson, who the former US president once referred to as “British Trump”, failed to persuade enough Conservative MPs last month to re-elect him as their leader and thus, under the British system, as prime minister.
The chaos, scandals and mismanagement of the Johnson government included parties in Downing Street as the rest of the country was told to observe strict covid-19 protocols. Conservative MPs opted for former Finance Minister Rishi Sunak, who has only been in power for a week but is already discovering what many observers believe is the key: that the Conservative Party is ungovernable.
Johnson, like Trump, is not ready to give up the spotlight. On Tuesday, he told Sky News that he planned to attend the COP27 climate summit in Egypt later this month. He made the announcement after Sunak said he would not attend due to demands to save the British economy, although there have been reports in recent days that he may change his mind.
Johnson, unlike Trump, was not defeated in a general election. Instead, his colleagues decided it was an electoral weakness, which is very different from how the GOP has treated Trump.
Johnson still believes he has a mandate to govern, given the landslide election victory he led in December 2019, and it’s a safe bet he’d be ready to strike if Sunak goes under.
Johnson’s hero is Winston Churchill, the poster child for political comebacks, who endured years in the political wilderness before his country turned to him for leadership in its darkest hour of World War II.
After his shock defeat in the 1945 election, the British leader didn’t go away either: he returned to 10 Downing Street as prime minister six years later.
