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• Topic:World Politics

14h ago14 hours agoThu 6 Nov 2025 at 4:54pm

In short:

Former US speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi has announced she will not contest the next election, to be held in November next year.

She was the first woman to become speaker, and the first person ever to regain the role after losing it.

Ms Pelosi, 85, was first elected in 1987.

Nancy Pelosi has announced she will not run for re-election to the US Congress in 2026, ending a four-decade career that made her both a progressive Democratic icon and a figure of vilification by the right.

The 85-year-old congresswoman was first elected in 1987 and later became the first woman to serve as the powerful speaker of the US House of Representatives.

She made the announcement on Thursday, local time, two days after elections across the US in which Democrats broadly did well.

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"I will not be seeking re-election to Congress. With a grateful heart, I look forward to my final year of service," Ms Pelosi said in a video posted on X.

Ms Pelosi's seat in the US lower house encompasses the west coast city of San Francisco, which in recent years has been typecast by the American right as being overrun with homelessness and drug addiction.

"My message to the city I love is this: San Francisco, know your power," she said.

"We have made history. We have made progress. We have always led the way.

"And now we must continue to do so by remaining full participants in our democracy and fighting for the American ideals we hold dear."

Ms Pelosi's retirement, while not completely unexpected, nevertheless sent ripples through Washington DC.

Feuds with Trump and personal tragedy

Ms Pelosi's later career has been dominated by trying to take on Republican Donald Trump, who feuded with her in his first presidential term from 2017–2020.

Ms Pelosi was asked by Reuters during a 2022 roundtable interview whether she had any career regrets, including the deepening rancour and divisions plaguing the House.

She said she wished she had won more elections to deny Republicans power and "to make sure that a creature like Donald Trump never became president of the United States".

Indeed, Ms Pelosi tried to remove Mr Trump from power twice, with House impeachments in late 2019 and early 2021, only to see Senate Republicans acquit him.

So deep was the animosity between Ms Pelosi and Mr Trump that it spilled onto the president's 2020 State of the Union address, when he refused to shake her hand upon his arrival in the House chamber.

She, in turn, stood up at the conclusion of his speech and with a dramatic flair, ripped in half a printed copy of the speech, later saying she did so because every page contained a "lie."

Republicans in 2021 expressed outrage at Ms Pelosi when she rejected their recommendations of two staunch Trump defenders to serve on a special committee investigating Mr Trump's role in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.

"Republicans will not be party to their sham process and will instead pursue our own investigation of the facts," said then-House minority leader Kevin McCarthy.

While Ms Pelosi accepted partisan fighting as a part of the job, the growing anger in US politics took a toll on her family in 2022, when a right-wing conspiracy theorist broke into her San Francisco home and struck her husband, Paul Pelosi, over the head with a hammer. 

He later recovered.

Breakthrough career as speaker

First elected in 1987 after having worked in California state party politics, Ms Pelosi has spent some four decades in public office. In that time, she fundraised more than $US1 billion ($1.54 billion).

Her legacy as House speaker comes not only because she was the first woman to have the job but also because of what she did with the gavel, seizing the enormous powers that come with the suite of offices overlooking the National Mall.

During her first tenure, from 2007 to 2011, she steered the House in passing landmark legislation into law — the Affordable Care Act, the Dodd-Frank financial reforms in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis and a repeal of the military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy against LGBTQ service members.

With president Barack Obama in the White House and Democratic senator Harry Reid of Nevada leading the Senate, the 2009–10 session of Congress ended among the most productive since the Johnson era.

But a conservative Republican "tea party" revolt bounced Democrats from power, ushering in a new style of Republicans, who would pave the way for Mr Trump to seize the White House in 2016.

Determined to win back control, Ms Pelosi helped recruit and propel dozens of women to office in the 2018 midterm elections as Democrats running as the resistance to Mr Trump's first term.

On the campaign trail that year, Ms Pelosi told The Associated Press that if House Democrats won, she would show the "power of the gavel".

She later became the first speaker to regain the office in some 50 years, and her second term, from 2019 to 2023, became potentially more consequential than the first, particularly as the Democratic Party's antidote to Mr Trump.

After Democrats lost control of the House in the 2022 midterm elections, Ms Pelosi announced she would not seek another term as party leader.

Rather than retire, she charted a new course for leaders, taking on the emerita title that would become used by others, including Republican representative Kevin McCarthy of California during his brief tenure after he was ousted by his colleagues from the speaker's office in 2023.

AP/Reuters