Undisputed leader of the Republicans in the Senate, veteran of American politics and ardent defender of aid to Ukraine, Mitch McConnell created a surprise on Wednesday by announcing that he would leave office in November.
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“I stand before you today (…) to tell you that this mandate will be my last as leader of the Republicans,” declared the 82-year-old elected official during a speech to Congress.
This surprise speech was greeted with standing ovations from elected officials from both sides in the hemicycle of the upper house.
Mitch McConnell, however, has not said whether he will leave his post as senator from Kentucky, which he has held since 1985.
Leader of the Republicans in the Senate since 2015, this fine connoisseur of the mysteries of power found himself on the front line of the fight against the policies of the administration of Democratic President Barack Obama (2009-2017), but also to support Donald Trump, who came to power in January 2017.
With his out-of-fashion suits, this man with fine metal frames has always cultivated an austere, even rustic image that is matched only by his reputation as a political strategist.
For years he greedily claimed the nickname “Gravedigger”, accustomed to burying the hopes of his democratic adversaries. Within the upper house of Congress, he worked hard to appoint Supreme Court judges, who canceled the constitutional guarantee of the right to abortion in 2022, to the great despair of American progressives.
Aid to Ukraine
“During my years in the Senate, Mitch McConnell and I have rarely agreed on our policies,” Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said Wednesday. “But I am proud that we have come together in recent years to advance the Senate at critical moments,” he said, referring among other things to the assault on the Capitol, the fight against Covid, and the war in Ukraine.
In recent years, Mitch McConnell, a patient negotiator in the shadows, has indeed distinguished himself as one of the greatest defenders of American aid to Kyiv, tirelessly pleading for the sending of new funds to this country invaded by Russia.
In this fight, Mitch McConnell, who embodies a traditional, rather pro-war wing of the Republican Party, had to deal with the arrival in Congress of Donald Trump’s lieutenants, espousing increasingly isolationist positions.
This radical change has been obvious in recent weeks, with the blocking of an envelope of 60 billion dollars for Ukraine, at war with Russia since February 2022, and the threats made by the former president towards -vis NATO allies — so many twists and turns highly criticized by Mitch McConnell.
The senator, who continued to praise Reagan’s legacy during his speech on Wednesday, has maintained a very ambivalent relationship with Donald Trump, the former president regularly covering Mitch McConnell with angry messages.
Under the Democratic presidency of Joe Biden, a man he worked alongside for years in the Senate, Mitch McConnell also worked on the passage of several major projects supported by both parties, notably on infrastructure.
In January 2023, the two men traveled together to Kentucky to promote the repair of a bridge thanks to this law. Joe Biden, a few months his junior, spoke of Mitch McConnell as a “friend”.
For several months, concerns had been raised about the state of health of the Republican leader, victim in the summer of two long periods of absence in one month.
In March, the octogenarian senator was hospitalized after a fall during a private dinner, which left him with a concussion, a broken rib and nearly six weeks off work.
The episode immediately revived criticism against the aging of the American political class, sometimes described as a gerontocracy.
Despite this, Mitch McConnell categorically refused to resign.
The influential senator has been married for more than thirty years to Elaine Chao, former Minister of Transport under Donald Trump.