Diego Añez at UCEMA Naumann Chair | held on 11/Sep/2020 

By Camila Barletta 

In this new edition of the cycle of lectures of the Naumann Chair of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom the protagonist was Diego Añez, Managing Director of the Washington International Trade Association and Manager of Young Trade Professionals. 

The main topic of the talk was the US elections of November and the impact of Covid19 on them. Where are we? How did we get here? What do we expect to see in November? Thus, began Añez´s talk. 

"Republicans and Democrats have marked the American political situation for many years and the elections of 2020 will not be the exception", he stressed. 

The Democrats are the liberal wing, leftist, they defend the existence of a minimum wage and of progressive taxation according to an income scale. In addition, they maintain that governmental regulations are necessary to protect consumers and they support universal health care, believing that the government should participate in health assistance. They base their pillars community and social responsibility. In this opportunity, the candidate is Joe Biden, who was vice president between 2009 and 2017 and was also a senator for the state of Delaware between 1973 and 2009. 

Republicans, on the other hand, are considered conservative, right-wing. They firmly maintain that taxes should not be raised and that wages should be established by the free market. They tend to favor flat taxes, the same rate at different levels of income and they believe that governmental regulations impede free market capitalism and full employment growth. There ideas are based on individual rights and in justice. In this opportunity, the candidate for the Republican party is the current president of the United States, Donald Trump. 

The 2020 presidential election will take place on Tuesday, November 3. Voters will have to elect the new president and vice president through the Electoral College system. The American election system refers to the existence of primary elections for each party. The main ones are the primaries of the Democrats and the Republican primaries, elections that have taken place at early 2020. Although the electoral process has not been fully completed due to the global health situation, the committees of the Democrats and of the Republicans have chosen Biden and Trump as the candidates. The Coronavirus put the entire world on pause and the United States was no exception. The declaration of pandemic by the World Health Organization occurred in the middle of the American electoral process. 

According to Añez, the sequels left by coronavirus a political level in the United States is something that did not occur in many countries. The virus started to generate a sort of political polarization in the people. People went out to manifest in the streets against the government´s measures with regard to coronavirus, against the use of masks to prevent the spread of the disease. In turn the arrival of the pandemic in the region generated fall of employment, drop in shares on Wall Street and consequently very high level of social discontent. Society was angry for being locked up and feeling that the national economy was coming to a stop, therefore, it took to the streets to manifest itself, again and again. The speaker, Diego, said that “The use of the mask in the US became a political point”. 

Candidates Trump and Biden realized that their actions in the midst of the pandemic would determine success or failure in the presidential elections of November. Social discontent is so high that with just giving an interest group what it asks for in a protest would be able to reverse their vote in November. Therefore, Trump and Biden began to make use and abuse of the pandemic to control and direct their votes in the official elections. 

Also, parallel to Covid19 issue, people began to demonstrate due to the rising racial tensions due to the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minnesota State Police. Social discontent is growing exponentially amid the challenge of having clean elections in November. The issue of the demonstrations by “Black lives matter” generated a change in the vision of candidate Donald Trump. As Diego commented and Trump himself highlighted in his speeches, “Trump is now seen as the law and order candidate”.  

The conventions of the Democratic and Republican parties have also marked a fundamental difference when it comes to understanding of the health emergency. On the one hand, the Democratic Party led by Joe Biden has held its conventions through teleconferences and with social distancing, almost without any crowding of people and always with respect for the virus. On the other hand, Donald Trump set up a massive convention in front of the White House, without social distance and even without mandatory masks. 

To conclude, it is possible to highlight that the pandemic in the midst of the US elections increased the political polarization to unprecedented scales. What will happen with the elections in November? We do not know.  What we do know is that no matter what happens, a great percentage of the population will remain dissatisfied, which could lead to manifestations and protests due to the rising social unrest. 

Diego Añez is Managing Director of Washington International Trade Association (WITA) and Executive Director of the Young Trade Professionals (YTP). He is responsible for the day-to-day management of the organization, coordination of events, strategic alliances and services for the 4,000 members of the organization he leads. Diego also supervises the internship program of WITA and the new talent recruitment. He coordinates, together with the board of directors, the organization´s policy proposals and the most important event of the year: The Annual Awards Dinner. Meanwhile, as the first Executive Director of Young Trade Professionals, the first group of public policy managers under 40, Diego facilitates the work and the contacts in the network of more than 1,600 members.  

Diego comes from Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, and was raised in Mobile, Alabama. He graduated from the University of Georgia con with a degree in Arts in Spanish and is Bachelor of Arts in International Affairs with concentrations in International Political Economy and Comparative Politics.