As protests against police brutality and against racism targeting black people shake the United States, the political atmosphere tends to be between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. The Democratic candidate for the White House accused the current president on Tuesday of having transformed the country into a "battlefield", while promising to do everything to "cure racial wounds". The death of 46-year-old George Floyd, a black man, a week ago in Minneapolis is "an electric shock for our country, for all of us," said former Barack Obama vice president during a speech to Philadelphia.
"Old resentments, new fears"
It was the first time since mid-March that Joe Biden, 77, ventured out of his state of Delaware, where he was confined because of the coronavirus pandemic. Filmed by passers-by, the homicide of George Floyd - asphyxiated, face against the ground, under the knee of a white police officer - outraged the country and the world, and provoked demonstrations across the United States which sometimes degenerated into riots.
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Joe Biden has repeatedly condemned the violence but on Tuesday accused Donald Trump, 73, of "turning this country into a battlefield divided by old resentments and new fears". "He thinks the division is helping him" to win the presidential election on November 3, said the Democrat, who is ahead of him in the polls.
An impossible police reform?
Joe Biden denounced the dispersal on Monday evening of "peaceful demonstrators" with "tear gas and stun grenades" to allow Donald Trump to carry out a "communication operation" by going to a church near the White House, a bible in hand. Seeing these scenes, "we are entitled to think that the president is more concerned with power than with principles. He is more interested in serving the passions of his base than the needs of those whom he is supposed to occupy, "he said.
"The time has come for our country to tackle institutional racism," he added, urging Congress to act this month, "starting with real police reform." If the vast majority of parliamentarians denounced the death of George Floyd, such rapid action seems difficult in a deeply divided Congress, between the House of Representatives led by the Democrats and a Republican Senate.