Midterms: the Senate tips, but has working-class anger found its voice?

According to Le Monde, Democrats win a majority of seats in the US Senate at the end of the 2026 midterm elections. Democrat James Talarico has been elected senator in Texas, a Republican stronghold. In Kansas, Adam Hamilton gives the Democratic Party a state senate seat for the first time since 1932. The paper speaks of a Democratic wave in Congress. Donald Trump, for his part, considers that the Democrats have "done a good job". Le Monde does not detail, in this summary, the margins or the exact make-up of the House: we will stick to what is established.

What follows is our reading, not a fact. Let us say it plainly: this is a slap in the face for the Republican Party, and it is gratifying to see a Texan fiefdom change hands, a Kansas seat wake from a ninety-year slumber. The ballot box is sometimes the only place where the powerful hear the noise of the street.

But the question is not who won. It is what this vote sets in motion. Rosa Luxemburg offered a simple test for judging a reform or a parliamentary victory: does it raise the strength and confidence of the working class, or does it demobilise it? An electoral wave that sends millions of people home, reassured, waiting for their elected representatives to "do a good job", is worth little in the face of capital. Capital takes back what it conceded as soon as profits demand it.

Trump's remark, moreover, deserves a pause. A defeated president who salutes his opponent with such bonhomie is not trembling. The American parliamentary game, with its neatly regulated alternation, is a theatre where two parties of the same order pass the baton to each other. That anger over the cost of living, frozen wages and exhausted public services finds its way into a ballot paper is legitimate. That it stops there would be a defeat dressed up as a victory.

Beware, however, of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Luxemburg said it: democracy is indispensable to the working class, because it is by exercising it, by fighting for it, that the class becomes aware of its interests and its historic task. The vote is a school, not a diploma. The question is whether unions, neighbourhood committees and tomorrow's strikers will make their way into the class.

We do not yet know what these new elected officials will do with their majority, nor whether they will dare to touch property relations rather than merely managing their cracks. Time will tell. The ballot boxes have knocked on the door; the question remains whether anyone behind it intends to break it down or merely to repaint it.