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Florida governor Ron DeSantis, of the Republican Party, has officially run for president of the United States for 2024: he should announce it himself in a live online (scheduled for midnight Italian) together with entrepreneur and Twitter owner Elon Musk, but in the meantime has already deposited the documents necessary for the candidacy, which is therefore formally already official.
To get to the last stage of the presidential campaign, the one in which a Republican candidate competes with only one candidate from the Democratic Party, DeSantis will first have to go through the Republican Party primaries, thus challenging former US President Donald Trump: at the moment the polls favor the latter, but the electoral campaign hasn’t really started yet and DeSantis is considered a very credible contender.
DeSantis is 44 years old, is a lawyer and is relatively new to American politics: he was elected to the United States House for the first time in 2012 and has been governor of Florida since 2018, a position in which he was confirmed for a second term in November of 2022. His candidacy was rather awaited: already during the last electoral campaign in Florida he had seemed to want to position himself in view of the primaries, his victory speech had seemed to some almost like a presidential speech and he had repeatedly refused to confirm whether he intended to complete his term as governor, which would end in 2026.
DeSantis is not a moderate Republican. During his first term as governor, the Florida government passed several bills targeting the LGBTQ+ community, including a particularly controversial law banning discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools, and made it impossible to vote in the mid-term elections almost a million people released from prison. More recently, last April, Florida passed one of the most restrictive laws in the United States against abortion, which bans it after the first six weeks of pregnancy: it has not yet formally entered into force pending a ruling by the Court Florida Supreme.
DeSantis is Trump’s main contender not only for the charisma he has shown, but also because of these extreme positions of his, which on many issues make him in fact rather comparable to Trump, but with the advantage of being able to present himself as a novelty ( Trump, on the other hand, has already lost to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential elections). In 2018 his candidacy for governor of Florida had been openly supported by Trump, but already during the last re-election campaign the relations between the two had seemed rather cold, and recently Trump has started calling him with rude nicknames like he does usually with his political opponents, such as “Ron DeSanctimonious.”