(Washington) The Democratic candidate for the US vice-presidency in 2024, Tim Walz, announced on Monday that he would not run for re-election as governor of Minnesota, amid a fraud scandal in public programs in this northern US state.
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“Every minute I spend advocating for my own political interests would be a minute I cannot spend defending Minnesotans from criminals who abuse our generosity and cynics who prey on our differences,” Tim Walz said in a statement.
“So I have decided to step aside from the race and let others worry about the election while I focus on the work to do,” added the running mate of Democratic candidate Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, lost to Donald Trump.
For several weeks, Republican officials, including Vice-President JD Vance, have taken up a vast affair of embezzlement of public funds which is affecting the Somali community of Minnesota.
In the main case, numerous individuals were convicted for their roles in diverting more than $300 million in grants to distribute free meals to children, meals in most cases never served.
Republican elected officials and the federal prosecutor in charge of the case suspect local authorities of having, for years, turned a blind eye to numerous alerts, because the affair concerned the Somali community of Minnesota, the largest in the country with around 80,000 members, traditionally favorable to Democrats.
“Hands in the bag”
Several conservative figures have cited the affair as an argument in favor of an even more marked tightening of Donald Trump’s migration policy.
“What’s happening in Minnesota shows, on a miniature scale, what immigration fraud is in our system,” Vice President JD Vance said in late December.
Donald Trump himself reacted to Tim Walz’s announcement on Monday, claiming without evidence that the Democrat had made this decision because he had been “caught red-handed” stealing “tens of billions of taxpayer dollars.”
The president also attacked Ilhan Omar, a Democratic congresswoman from Minnesota, asserting that this figure of the American left, of Somali origin, was also guilty of these embezzlements.
But for Tim Walz, the affair was blown up by the right for electoral purposes.
“I’m not going to mince words here. Donald Trump and his allies (…) want to make our state a colder, meaner place,” the Democratic governor said in his press release on Monday.
The elected official highlighted the work carried out, according to him, by his services to fight against fraud.
“We will win the fight against fraudsters. But the political maneuvering that we are seeing from Republicans only makes this fight harder to win,” he said.
Elected since January 2019 at the head of Minnesota, a state of nearly six million inhabitants, Tim Walz was to run for a third term in November 2026, two years after his defeat as vice-president.
