http://www.iht.com/IHT/TODAY/FRI/IN/react.2.html Paris, Friday, November 10, 2000 World Views of U.S. Election: 'Like Italy!' and 'Banana Republic'
Compiled by Our Staff From Dispatches
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.''