She still hopes to create what would be a very big surprise in the race to the White House. For two years, she carried the voice of Donald Trump on the international stage. Today, Nikki Haley appears to be the final obstacle still standing between the ex-president and the Republican nomination for the presidential election in November.
After Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ rallying behind Donald Trump on Sunday, a distant second in the Iowa caucus which opened the Republican primaries on January 15, only Nikki Haley, who came third, can in fact still challenge him for an overwhelming victory in New Hampshire.
A “globalist”, according to Trump
To try to win, this former governor of South Carolina, the only woman in the running and the new darling of the American right, offers a very classic conservative argument, on a federal state considered hypertrophied, a debt and taxes that are too heavy and a immigration system accused of laxity. She advocates raising the retirement age for new entrants to the labor market in order to save the social security and health insurance systems from bankruptcy.
Donald Trump calls her a “globalist” all the time. “She loves the world, I love America first,” he said during a meeting in Iowa. He accuses him pell-mell of wanting to “increase taxes, bleed Social Security” or even “open the borders”, without specifying on what basis.
Quite similar programs
But, in reality, their programs hardly differ, except on Ukraine, which Nikki Haley wants to continue to support massively, while Donald Trump prides himself on being able to play mediator between kyiv and Moscow. The battle is therefore essentially a question of style and generation.
After having long spared the one who appointed her in 2017 to the prestigious post of ambassador to the United Nations despite her lack of international experience, Nikki Haley is holding back less and less. “Whether it is deserved or not, chaos follows,” she repeats in recent weeks, in a possible allusion to the multiple indictments of Donald Trump. “We will not survive four more years of chaos,” insists Nikki Haley, 52, putting outgoing Democratic President Joe Biden, 81, and his former boss, 77, back to back.
The candidate calls for “electing a leader of a new generation and leaving negativity and liabilities behind us”. She also intensified her criticism this weekend, publicly questioning a possible age-related alteration of Donald Trump’s “mental abilities”. He himself has been calling her “sparrow brains” for months. He apparently does not forgive him for this crime of lèse-majesté of having gone back on his promise not to run against him if he was a candidate in 2024.
Entering politics in 2004
Nikki Haley claims to see in these attacks a sign of her ascendant momentum in the polls, driven by her notable performances during the debates between Republican candidates, in which Donald Trump did not deign to participate. She notably distinguished herself by a more moderate speech than her rivals on the right to abortion. The question has brought his party a series of electoral disappointments since the Supreme Court annulled the constitutional protection of the right to abortion in the country. She declares herself in favor of a “national consensus” on the subject, both to prohibit “late-term abortions” but also to oppose prison sentences in the event of abortion in states which prohibit it.
Born Nimarata Nikki Randhawa, she is the daughter of a couple of Indian immigrants of Sikh religion. Mother of two children, she is married to a National Guard officer, currently deployed in Djibouti. She entered the political scene with her election in 2004 to the legislature of her native state of South Carolina, then rose to national prominence in 2010 during her campaign to become governor.
Once elected, Nikki Haley maintained her course to the right, displaying her hostility to unions and taxes, as well as to homosexual marriage, or by showing reluctance to welcome Syrian refugees in her state. On June 17, 2015, a white supremacist entered a Charleston church and killed nine African-American worshipers. After refusing to do so for a long time, she then ordered the removal of the Confederate flag, a symbol of the state’s slavery past, from the South Carolina Parliament. She will know in a few months if her different positions have allowed her to achieve her goal: to be the first woman to occupy the Oval Office of the White House for four years.