The governor of Florida and candidate for the Republican primaries, Ron DeSantis, has distanced himself from former United States President Donald Trump’s conspiracy theory about alleged voter fraud in the 2020 elections.
“I have said it many times, the election is what it is. All those theories that were put forward did not turn out to be true (…) I think that those theories proved to be unfounded,” the Republican candidate told the media.
DeSantis, one of the main candidates along with Trump to lead the Republicans in the 2024 elections, has been critical of “the way in which” the 2020 elections were conducted, but has stressed that this is not why you can talk of fraud.
“They were not elections that were carried out as I think we want, but this is different from saying that ‘Maduro stole votes’ or something like that,” DeSantis said, thus including Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in the equation.
These statements by the governor of Florida occur in a context marked by the accusations of criminal offenses that the US Justice charges against former President Trump for his alleged efforts to invalidate the result of the elections.
After being bested by Joe Biden in his bid for re-election, Trump encouraged a rhetoric of voter fraud for weeks that eventually led to the storming of the Capitol on January 6 by a mob of acolytes.
Now Trump has once again presented his candidacy for the Republican Party primaries, where he will have to face other conservative figures in the country such as DeSantis himself or who was vice president during his stay in the White House, Mike Pence.
Despite being able to disagree with the ex-president’s theories about the alleged electoral fraud, most Republicans have agreed to criticize the Biden Administration because they consider that the trial of Trump is politically motivated.
