World Views
of U.S. Election: 'Like Italy!' and 'Banana Republic'
Election 2000 / 'A Debacle That
Could Turn Into a Comedy,' Said Die Welt
Paris, Friday, November 10, 2000
Many people around the world are used
to elections that are plagued by turmoil, confusion and
irregularities. They just are not used to seeing them in
the United States. While the
electoral authorities in Florida tried to sort out the
ballots to determine whether Governor George W. Bush or
Vice President Al Gore had won the White House, ordinary
citizens from Hong Kong to Helsinki on Thursday marveled
at the uncertain electoral situation in the United
States.
''It's like Italy!'' said owner of a
coffee bar in Rome.
A cab driver in Lagos said, ''If this
had happened in Nigeria or anywhere else in Africa, the
whole world would be pointing fingers at us.''
Some observers saw the confusion as
proof of the strength of the American system of
politics. Others were stunned that a country with
economic, political and cultural clout in the farthest
reaches of the globe could be plunged into electoral
limbo.
And Italians, often the butt of jokes
about ''opera buffa'' politics and governments falling
like leaves, poked fun at the United States on Thursday.
''A day as a banana republic'' was the
headline published by La Repubblica, a daily newspaper
based in Rome.
Italians are no strangers to
postelection confusion, missing ballot boxes, trading
votes like baseball cards, exit polls getting it wrong
and dead people left on electoral lists. But they never
expected it to happen in the United States.
''The first election of the new
millennium has brought America into the realm of the
surreal,'' La Repubblica added.
In Germany, newspapers were no less
harsh in their indictment.
''It is not a cheap detective novel,
not a soap opera, but a debacle that could turn into a
comedy,'' Die Welt wrote on its front page.
The daily Berliner Zeitung said it was
dumbstruck by the ''chaos,'' adding, ''One could gloss
over it amused if it were about the mayor of Chicago and
not the most powerful man in the world.''
The ''antiquated'' Electoral Collage
system, which allowed Mr. Gore to win the popular vote
but not necessarily the election, caused confusion for
the Westdeutsche Zeitung. ''This is not about an
election in the Wild West, but about a modern
superpower,'' it said.
In Paris, Le Monde had a similar view,
saying in an editorial: ''There is also the question of
the legitimacy of a president who would be elected with
a majority of the Electoral College but with a minority
of the popular vote. Does the Electoral College still
have meaning today?''
Less alarmingly, Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung said the uncertainty would not
undermine the legitimacy of the next president.
''Even a small margin is a margin,''
it said on its front page.
Newspapers in every corner of the
world faced a similar problem: how to explain the
outcome.
The safest approach was to treat the
election as a political who-won-it, akin to a murder
mystery. In Sweden, Expressen called it a thriller.
Newsstands in Tokyo displayed
bold-type posters proclaiming, ''Gore Won, Didn't He?''
In Argentina, Pagina Doce, with a nod
at the Hollywood aspects of the whole episode, published
a headline in English saying, ''And the Winner Is...''
Some Russian officials, meanwhile,
took the opportunity to gloat, after decades of enduring
American preaching about democracy.
''Our presidential elections are
conducted in more a democratic fashion and are more
easily understood by voters,'' Alexander Veshnyakov,
chairman of the Central Election Commission in Russia,
told the newspaper Kommersant.
The Russian president, Vladimir Putin,
elected in a landslide last March despite refusing to
take part in the official campaign, got in a small dig
of his own by suggesting that Mr. Veshnyakov could sort
out the U.S. impasse.
And as has usually been the case with
politics in Russia, in both the Soviet and post-Soviet
eras, many people reduced the debate to jokes.
''With the outcome uncertain, the
Americans have sought help from the Central Election
Commission,'' one joke said on the Web site
www.anekdot.ru. ''Veshnyakov has flown to the United
States. Latest reports show Vladimir Putin in the
lead.''
Some other public figures, even those
with multilingual gifts of finding the right phrase,
found themselves at a loss for words.
''It is amazing,'' said Romano Prodi,
the president of the European Commission. ''It's almost
unbelievable - some 200 million voters, and the decision
should be made by just a couple hundred votes or so. But
life is so complicated.''
One Mexican analyst indicated Thursday
that some of his countrymen were amused at the
uncertainty of the U.S. count after enduring decades as
the butt of foreign jokes for electoral chaos.
''It does sound very Mexican,'' said a
political scientist named Federico Estevez. ''It will
probably play well here.''
But Brazilians, who fought through
years of military dictatorship to free their country
from indirect elections, were perplexed to find a form
of it surviving in, of all places, the United States.
''One candidate gets more votes than
the other, and he's not the winner?'' asked Josimar
Nunes Ferreira, a delivery man in Sao Paulo. ''How can
that be? That doesn't seem democratic to me.''
In Asia, a continent where democracy
is in its infancy in many countries and yet to be
conceived in others, the news media generally hailed the
U.S. election race as a model of a people's choice.
But Asian papers warned that whichever
candidate emerges as winner faces the daunting task not
only of governing a finely divided nation but also of
winning the trust of the half of the electorate who did
not vote for him.
In Japan, Nihon Keizai Shimbun, an
influential financial daily, said: ''The election showed
the weight that each ballot carries in a democracy. The
next president of the United States may be decided by a
few hundred votes in Florida, and no matter how minute
the difference may be, in an election it is absolute.''
That plaudit for the democratic
process from one of Asia's most established democracies
was echoed elsewhere.
Indonesia, which just last year chose
its first democratically elected head of state, drew
hope from the U.S. election even as its own president,
Abdurrahman Wahid, is trying to counter mounting
attempts by the political elite to push him aside.
The Jakarta Post wrote in an
editorial, ''As a fledgling democracy, Indonesia could
learn much from Wednesday's U.S. election and from the
political maturity the American people displayed in
adhering to their democratic principles.''
It added, ''No matter how much the
candidates criticize each other, and no matter how
enthusiastic their supporters are, once the winner of
the contest has been declared, the supporters will stand
firmly behind the victor as a united nation and support
their elected president.''
Journalists for Cuba's state news
media blamed fraud for the situation in Florida, home to
the majority of Cuban exiles.
''Fraud is not new in the American
political system and it is not new in Florida,'' said
Raul Taladrid, a Cuban TV personality.
The Cuban president, Fidel Castro,
himself lampooned low voter turnout in the United States
by spending the day Tuesday at the beach. State
television showed Mr. Castro walking along the shore in
his usual olive green uniform and boots, and running
into an unidentified American tourist.
''Like the majority of Americans, you
have gone to the beach,'' Mr. Castro told the man.
It was left to an Italian to poke fun
at another country's election.
A columnist, Bepe Severgnini, writing
in the Milan newspaper Corriere della Sera, said: ''The
other night when I went into a restaurant in Santa
Monica, there was one president - Clinton. When I
ordered a pizza there was another one - Gore. When I
paid the bill there was a third president - Bush. And
when I walked out onto Ocean Boulevard there was no
president because Bill is now the husband of a senator
from New York.''
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