The start of the new Congress could not have gone better for the Democrats.

What hadn't the Republicans boasted about finally holding Biden and his party to account with their newfound power in the House of Representatives?

Instead, they first fell out with themselves – before the eyes of the nation, before the eyes of the world.

Embarrassing, the President remarked, adding after McCarthy's victory in the fifteenth ballot: The Democrats are now ready to work with the Republicans.

This won't be easy.

The spectacle of right-wing dissenters making McCarthy their plaything is a foretaste of what awaits American politics in the next two years.

The Republican Party is by no means paralyzed, as it might have seemed in the wild days of blockade and blackmail.

Rather, she has shown how far she is willing to go to achieve her goals.

There is a stalemate in Congress.

A law needs the approval of both chambers, the Senate and the House of Representatives.

Are the necessary political compromises possible with a party whose radical wing has just shown that it does not shy away from a rift within its own ranks in order to achieve its goals?

Afghanistan and Hunter Biden

In the campaign against the Democrats and their president, the Republicans in Congress should be far more united.

At the top of her wish list are investigations into the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the dealings of the President's son, Hunter Biden, in Ukraine.

McCarthy said on the night of his election that it was time to really take control of the president's policies.

He has had to concede the rebels from the right-wing fringe of his party great influence in the committees of the House of Representatives.

American finances are likely to be the biggest bone of contention in Congress.

If President Biden wants to raise the debt ceiling again, he will face stiff resistance.

This dispute is not new, but is likely to be particularly heated in the new situation.

McCarthy has pledged to his critics to cut American spending.

In the end, however, there has to be a compromise or the world's largest economy is threatened with temporary insolvency.

The spokesman himself is now in a weakened position: in the future, just one member's vote will again be sufficient for a vote of no confidence.

That was also the case before his predecessor Nancy Pelosi, but McCarthy is dealing with opponents who happily speak of a straitjacket that his concessions put on him for the duration of the speakership.

Under these circumstances, raising the debt ceiling, adopting a budget or approving new aid to Ukraine will be a difficult task.

Trump endorsed McCarthy

Biden said after McCarthy's election that voters voted for party cooperation in the November congressional elections.

This was an allusion to the failure of the candidates Donald Trump had promoted.

But in the House of Representatives, Trump supporters are by far not the only ones who are right-wing rebels.

For years, McCarthy himself oscillated between the establishment and the right-wing fringe of his party when it came to the speakership.

In the end, this earned him Trump's support.

Two years after the storming of the Capitol, the political climate in Congress is worse than ever.

This does not only apply to the way the two parties deal with each other.

McCarthy's opponents had no problem publicly humiliating and discrediting their own party's leader for days with personal attacks.

Matt Gaetz, one of the fiercest opponents, said just hours before McCarthy's victory that McCarthy didn't deserve the post and would never get enough votes.

Will Republican voters see the blockade as a heroic fight for their interests or as self-interested profiling?

A lot can still happen before the internal party primaries for the presidential candidacy are held in just over a year.

The Americans are concerned with many of the issues that the Republicans, and not just the rebels, have taken up the cause of: the situation on the southern border, the government's high spending, and a lot of politics behind closed doors in Washington.

The question is how much one can trust MPs, many of whom opposed the democratic system as electoral deniers.