What impact would Hillary Clinton's policies have on Europe and Italy if the American candidate were to become President of the United States on 8 November? Here are five possible areas in which Clinton's ideas and programme could influence the Old Continent.

Farewell to the TTIP?

To begin with, Barack Obama's departure from the White House could change the fate of the TTIP, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership — that is, the treaty between the United States and the European Union over which more or less secret negotiations have been ongoing for months. Hillary Clinton, despite not having expressed herself as clearly on the subject as her rivals Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders did during the campaign, seems far less convinced than Obama has been. There are two telling signs: one is the scepticism she showed towards the Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership, the equivalent agreement that the United States concluded with Pacific countries ("as it stands, it looks more like a mistake than an opportunity to me — the negotiations need a pause," she had said). The other sign is her electoral programme, which places great emphasis on relaunching small businesses — which would instead be disadvantaged by a global treaty: "I've said I want to be the president of small businesses, and I mean it."

The strategy on Syria and Isis

With Hillary Clinton in the White House, the United States could become more interventionist, particularly in the situations of instability pressing at Europe's borders, and therefore Italy's. In foreign policy, Clinton is in clear disagreement with Obama at least on Syria: "We should have armed the rebels against the dictator Bashar al-Assad — our failure to act was a mistake." On Russia too, a President Clinton would have been far tougher, both during the crisis with Ukraine and over what she saw as ambiguities in the fight against terrorism. At this moment, however, the European strategy for the Middle East — strongly supported by Italy, among others — is to regard Isis as a more serious threat than Assad or Putin.

Sheltered from Wall Street and its crises

Hillary Clinton has promised a regulatory intervention on Wall Street and the financial sector that could also protect our continent, in particular through the separation of commercial banks from investment banks. The economic crisis from which Europe is only now beginning to emerge with difficulty, for example, originated in 2007 in the United States, from the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the crises at other investment banks such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley: only eight years earlier, in 1999 — and, ironically, under Bill Clinton's presidency — the United States had repealed, under pressure from the banking lobby, the Glass-Steagall Act, a law drawn up in the wake of the Great Depression of 1929 precisely to protect savers in the event of a high-finance collapse. Hillary therefore aims to restore a rule that her husband had scrapped, and which would probably have prevented, and could prevent in the future, a great deal of trouble for Europe as well.

Green leadership for everyone

She is not Bernie Sanders, who would happily have introduced a carbon tax on oil and fossil fuels, but she is not Donald Trump either, who regards climate change as "just one big hoax." On climate, a Clinton presidency would continue along the lines of Obama's, in full respect of the COP 21 targets. And perhaps even more so: the Democratic candidate's programme includes making the US "the world leader in the fight against climate change by reducing gas emissions by 30 per cent compared to 2005 levels within the next decade." Not to mention the 60 billion dollars to be allocated to the Clean Energy Challenge, which "will help Americans benefit from a clean energy economy by encouraging investment in energy efficiency." In short, Europe would benefit from an America willing to take on the role of global leader in the fight for sustainability.

A boost for gay rights

Long active in the field of civil rights, Hillary Clinton has also included the issue of same-sex marriage within her electoral campaign, even commissioning a moving video. As president, Hillary would propose a federal law to make same-sex marriages legal throughout the country — today they are governed by local rules and are only legal in 37 states. And there is more: at the end of last year, a Utah judge annulled the adoption of a baby girl by a lesbian couple, and Clinton publicly took the two women's side: "Being good parents," she said, "has nothing to do with sexual orientation. Thousands of families prove it." A progressive push of this kind from a country as influential and deeply traditionalist on the subject of the family as the United States could stir something in our public opinion too. Italy has just passed a civil unions law for non-heterosexual couples, amid considerable controversy because they are considered "almost" equivalent to marriage, and from which the section specifically relating to adoptions was removed. Adoptions for which a separate law will be drawn up after the summer — by which point Clinton could already have been elected.