“Let’s finish the job”: Joe Biden announced his candidacy for the 2024 presidential election on Tuesday morning, promising to restore its “dignity” to working-class America, which his rival Donald Trump has partly seduced.

“I’m running for re-election,” the President of the United States said in a video posted on Twitter, associating himself with current Vice President Kamala Harris.

The three-minute message, posted at 6 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, opens with footage of Trumpists attacking the Capitol, shot on Jan. 6, 2021. Joe Biden repeats a simple idea in it: he embodies the fight, always in progress, according to him, for freedom and democracy.

The Democrat has been confiding for months that he has the “intention” to represent himself. But April 25 is far from a trivial date for the launch of his campaign. Tuesday marked the fourth anniversary to the day of Joe Biden’s last campaigning, when he launched a battle for the “soul of America” ​​and stripped Donald Trump of a second term. .

“Let’s finish the job!” “he launches in his video.

Since the beginning of the year, Joe Biden has been reiterating his desire to give back to “forgotten” popular America, disturbed by globalization, a central place in society. During an followingnoon speech, the Democrat paid tribute to the “masons”, “painters”, “plumbers” and workers of the country. “It’s the middle class, not Wall Street, that built the United States,” he told trade unionists.

He never ceases to recall the very ambitious reforms adopted on his initiative to reindustrialize the United States, attract cutting-edge technologies, accelerate the energy transition and renovate infrastructures.

Age, a ball and chain

The main handicap of the Democrat, whose popularity rating remains poor, remains his age. In 2020, Americans have never elected such an old president. Nor had a candidate ever asked them to leave him the keys to the White House until he was 86 years old.

Joe Biden certainly displays unusual endurance, juggling between international crises and major reforms. His trip to Kiev, an unprecedented initiative for the Head of State surrounded by the strictest security arrangements in the world, was a spectacular reminder of his role as the architect of the Western response following the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.

Still, in a country where image is everything, where a candidate must overflow with vitality, the president cannot hide his years of life. His gait is more cautious; his speech is sometimes muddled — he has suffered from stuttering since childhood —; he has moments of confusion which the Republican opposition seizes on to cast doubt on his mental acuity.

“Biden is so out of touch with reality that he thinks he deserves four more years in power,” Opposition Leader Ronna McDaniel said Tuesday morning. In a dystopian video, Republicans imagine what four more years of Biden’s presidency would look like: bombs in Taiwan, looted stores, hordes of migrants at the borders…

Trump, DeSantis or another

But Joe Biden has noted that, according to the polls, the candidacy of his predecessor Donald Trump, 76, indicted by a New York court, does not excite the electorate any more than his own. The Democrat therefore believes that if he once beat his Republican rival, a divisive figure par excellence, he can do it once more by highlighting his good-natured personality and his unifying program.

His campaign site already offers mugs, t-shirts and stickers bearing the image of the “Biden-Harris” tandem.

There remains a big unknown: what would Joe Biden’s chances be if he faced a younger opponent in November 2024? The name of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a 44-year-old radical right figure, is circulating widely. But he has not yet declared himself.

To see in video