Republican primaries: Nikki Haley, establishment candidate without denying Trump

She is the first to throw herself into the Republican arena against Donald Trump.

Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina and American ambassador to the UN, announced in a video, Tuesday, February 14, her candidacy for the American presidential 2024. The task is difficult: the billionaire, determined to win the primaries of Republican Party, has a well-known tendency to humiliate its rivals.

The most feared of them, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, has still not announced his ambitions for the White House.

Former Vice President Mike Pence, former Foreign Minister Mike Pompeo and Senator Tim Scott, also from South Carolina, are also among the potential candidates.

Get excited!

Time for a new generation.

Let's do this!

👊 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/BD5k4WY1CP

— Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) February 14, 2023

Nikki Haley, currently at the bottom of the table in the polls, may be hoping to gain visibility and raise as much money as possible before the heavyweights enter the scene.

She has also planned, after an announcement in person this Wednesday in Charleston, South Carolina, trips to Iowa and New Hampshire, states that vote first in the primaries.

Anyway, no question for his campaign to attack his former boss head-on: "It's time for a new generation" to take power, the 51-year-old candidate is content to repeat in this video where Donald Trump's name is not mentioned once.

The relationship between these two is complex.

Long before the rise of Trumpism, Nikki Haley was long considered a politician of the Republican establishment, a symbol of the American dream.

The daughter of Punjab Indian immigrants, Nimrata Nikki Randhawa grew up in a family of four in rural South Carolina.

Her mother wears a sari, her father a turban.

Both work in education and run a small business at the same time.

When she was a teenager, Nikki Haley helped with accounting and made it her job.

political beast

In 2004, married to a National Guard soldier with whom she has two children, she entered politics.

After serving in her state's House of Representatives, in 2010 she became the first woman and person of Indian descent elected governor of South Carolina, and the youngest to hold such a position in the United States.

Observers then present her as a formidable political beast capable of eating the Democrats one by one all the way to the Oval Office.

In an op-ed published Monday by the New York Times, Stuart Stevens, a former Republican campaign consultant for Mitt Romney and George W. Bush, recalled that she was "all the party needed to win": "C was a woman when the party needed more women, a daughter of immigrants when the party needed more immigrants, a young reformer when the party needed more young voters, and a symbol of tolerance that removed the Confederate flag at a time when the party needed to appeal to people of color and educated residents of residential suburbs."

The removal of the Southern or Confederate flag (considered the emblem of slavers) from official buildings of his state, just after the racist shooting at a black church in Charleston in 2015, is indeed considered the most emblematic measure of the mandate of Nikki Haley in South Carolina.

In the 2016 Republican primaries, she supported Marco Rubio then Ted Cruz against Donald Trump refusing to condemn white supremacists.

And yet, nine months later, she turns around and agrees to serve in his administration.

And not in just any position: she becomes the face of his isolationist diplomacy at the UN, despite his lack of experience in foreign policy and his own convictions rather close to those of the Republican interventionist "hawks".

“I am proud to serve in this administration and I enthusiastically support most of its decisions and the direction it is taking the country,” she wrote in a column in 2018.

Political opportunism

Later that year, Nikki Haley abruptly quit her job as UN ambassador and returned to her home state, where she joined Boeing's board of directors and lectured for $200,000.

She is preparing for her return, taking great care not to criticize Donald Trump.

In 2019, in her autobiography "With All Due Respect", she mentioned her name 163 times, mostly in glowing terms.

Today, Nikki Haley is trying to return to her more civilized image to attract what are left of the moderates in the Republican electorate.

But some, like

in his column at the New York Times, do not forgive him for his political opportunism.

"Mrs. Haley, for all her talents, symbolizes the moral failure of a party seeking victory at all costs, a quest so ruthless and relentless that it transformed the GOP (Great Old Party, the nickname of the Republican Party, editor's note) into an autocratic movement." 

He also points out that it was not the attack on the Capitol of January 6, 2021 that prompted Nikki Haley to appear against Trump.

She had even declared in April 2021 that she would not do so if he were a candidate for re-election.

It was not until the disappointing Republican results in the mid-term elections, and in particular the elimination of candidates supported by the ex-president, that she decided to enter the campaign.

"Far too ambitious" 

For Stuart Stevens, his candidacy is doomed: “There is a great future behind Nikki Haley, he mocks. She will never be the voice of truth that she was briefly in 2016, and she will never will never be enough MAGA (Make America Great Again, the rallying cry of the Trumpists, Ed) to satisfy the base of his party.

What if this campaign actually hid another one?

In Washington, commentators see Nikki Haley as a potential running mate for the primary winner.

His pedigree in international politics and his restraint could counterbalance the aggressiveness of a Trump or a DeSantis.

A theory rejected by some of his relatives.

"In every race she's been in, whether it's being elected to the local parliament or running for governor, or even when she's been named ambassador to the UN, people have underestimated her. and assured that she did not have a chance”, reminds the media The Hill Alex Stroman, former executive director of the Republican Party of South Carolina.

"I don't think Nikki Haley would enter the competition if she really wanted to hang back and become vice president."

The main interested party repeats over and over again that she has never lost an election in her life.

Faced with the fight that promises to be during the Republican primaries, she will have to hang on.

Trump has already declared that his former protege was "far too ambitious".

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