On the final stretch towards victory? Following the assassination attempt, former President Donald Trump was announced as the presidential candidate amid jubilation at the Republican nominating convention. Is a victory in the US elections in November more likely now?
“The attack will certainly bring him more sympathy,” political scientist and Latin America expert Günther Maihold told DW in an interview. “This puts a person in a different realm. The population sees him as someone in particular need of protection, but also as a savior. This also applies to Trump,” he says.
Maihold is referring to the attempted assassination of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who was seriously injured at an election campaign rally on September 6, 2018 in Rio de Janeiro.Bolsonaro won the presidential election in October of that year with 55 percent of the vote.
“A mix of sacrifice and catharsis”
“I think there is a kind of Bolsonaro effect,” Maihold says. “The candidate becomes a symptom of the decadence of his own society and at the same time a sympathetic figure. This is a mixture of victimhood and catharsis. This constellation creates an additional element of charisma,” he adds.
Brazilian columnist Joel Pinheiro da Fonseca goes further, writing in the Folha de S. Paulo newspaper that Bolsonaro is not the only one to have won an election after an assassination attempt: “US President Ronald Reagan was also re-elected with a large majority three years after the assassination attempt in March 1981.”
Pinheiro’s conclusion is that “Both were already favourites, the assassination attempts only sealed their success. The same is likely to happen with Trump.”
Modi survives assassination attempt
This also applies to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. On 27 October 2013, he survived a bomb attack carried out by the Islamist organisations “Mujahideen” and “Student Islamic Movement of India” in Patna, the capital of the Indian state of Bihar.
The attack took place in the midst of an election campaign. In the elections held between 7 April and 12 May 2014, Modi won a majority in the Indian Parliament for his party, the BJP, for the first time. He has now been in office for ten years.
Like all world leaders, Modi has condemned the attempted assassination of Trump and called for peace. But beyond the official condemnation of political violence, social media is dominated by recriminations.
“Global leftist networks”
On social media platform X, Indian government spokesman Amit Malviya immediately blamed the “global left” for the attack. Shortly after the attack on Trump, he posted: “Shinzo Abe, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico and now Donald Trump. The threat is real. Global leftist networks are at work.”
Bolsonaro’s son, Flávio, spread the same idea. “The extreme left demonizes and dehumanizes its opponents with lies, “And this with the support of the established media,” he wrote in X. “And then a ‘lone wolf’ appears who has to save the world from the ‘enemy of democracy’, the ‘genocidaires’ or the ‘militias’. This is the formula of hatred that has real and almost deadly consequences.”
Both are convinced that “murders are always directed against conservative and right-wing political leaders.” However, a look at the past shows that this is not the case.
Political assassination in Quito
Democratic U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, running for a second term, was shot in the street in Milwaukee on October 14, 1912.
Democratic presidential candidate Robert Kennedy, brother of President John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1963, was also killed during the 1968 primary campaign.
A particularly traumatic example was the assassination of Ecuadorian presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio a year ago. The investigative journalist, who had reported on corruption and violence in his home country, was shot dead at an election campaign rally in Quito on 9 August 2023.
Political violence from the right and the left
The list of assassinations of presidential candidates is long. Among the victims is former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, who was poisoned with dioxin in 2004. And the Catholic priest and former president of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was shot on March 20, 2017, but escaped unharmed.
“Whether the attack came from the left or the right is irrelevant,” says political researcher Maihold. Trump does not fit into the scheme. After all, the shooter was a member of the Republican Party. “It is rather a question of the fact that we have reached a point where polarisation is entering a new phase,” says the expert.
The use of violence is said to be becoming more and more acceptable: “This new level of escalation is especially dramatic in a country with a density of weapons like the United States,” Maihold adds.