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Joe Biden and Kamala Harris: The expectations are high
Photo: Andrew Harnik / dpa
The future US President Joe Biden and the future Vice President Kamala Harris have been named People of the Year by Time Magazine.
The announced rock superstar Bruce Springsteen on NBC.
"Time" editor-in-chief Edward Felsenthal said, referring to the two award winners: "The next four years will be an enormous test for them and for all of us to see whether they can bring about the unity they have promised."
In the presidential election on November 3, the Democrat Biden had won against the Republican incumbent Donald Trump.
In the election campaign, Biden had advertised, among other things, that he wanted to overcome the deeply deepened division in the USA during the presidency of his predecessor Donald Trump.
Biden was Vice President under Trump's predecessor Barack Obama from 2009 to 2017.
Harris - currently still in the US Senate - will be the first woman, first black and first American with South Asian roots to serve as vice president.
Biden and Harris are due to be sworn in on January 20th in Washington.
Felsenthal wrote on the page of “Time Magazine”: “Perhaps the only thing Americans agree on at the moment is that the future of the country is at stake, even if they argue violently about why.” If Trump in the had been a "force of division" in the past four years, then Biden and Harris showed where the US was headed: "a mixture of ethnicities, life experiences and world views that must find a way forward together if the American experiment is to survive." In brief reactions on the NBC broadcast, Biden and Harris thanked them for the honor.
Donald Trump was also nominated
Also on the shortlist for the “Person of the Year” were Donald Trump, the prominent US health expert Anthony Fauci together with the health care workers because of their commitment to the Corona crisis and the “Black Lives Matter” movement.
The death of the African American George Floyd as a result of a brutal police operation in Minneapolis in late May led to months of protests against racism.
Last year, the then 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg was the youngest person ever to be named Person of the Year by Time Magazine.
With the title since 1927, the "Time" editorial team has honored the personalities in world affairs who, from the magazine's point of view, had the greatest influence on the past year.
In 2015 - the year of the refugee crisis - Chancellor Angela Merkel, for example, was named Person of the Year.
A year later, Donald Trump was given the honor after winning the US presidential election.
In 2018, among others, the murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was named Person of the Year together with other reporters.
In the past, Queen Elizabeth II, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Nelson Mandela as well as Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin were among those honored.
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