RYAN HAGEN
Staff Writer
As the presidential candidates fight for placement on the airwaves and the pages of domestic newspapers, Europe has been viewing the primary season from a different angle.
Developments receive front page coverage in major international newspapers, which tend to put events in more of a world context than American papers, but information passes through a different filter in each country.
“When I was in Ireland, they had whole channels just about the election in the United States … they’re wondering about the American economy and if they are still dependent on it,” according to Leonardo Lastilla, professor of Humanities at Pepperdine’s Florence program, whose wife is Irish. “In Italy [the media] don’t talk about the preliminaries as much, just the general election, [but] Italians love to talk about the politics of every country.”
The Italian paper Corriere della Sera devoted two of its 72 pages on Jan. 11, two days after the New Hampshire primary, to the day’s election news. Half of that analyzed Hillary Clinton’s emotional moment before the voting began, drawing comparisons between her tender moment and emotional displays by other world leaders, including French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Margaret Thatcher, the first female prime minister of the United Kingdom.
Corriere della Sera also offered an online guide to the details of the election process, such as the difference between an open and a closed primary, and informed its readers of the different mindset it said is common in America.
“In the United States, in contrast to the European tradition,” the guide explained in Italian, “the vote is not considered a civic duty but rather a right.”
The Guardian, a prominent British paper, has been closely monitoring the election and often resembles a slightly left-leaning U.S. news outlet in its outlook. At least one of the five most-read stories on its Web site nearly always concerns the U.S. elections, with the top spot Saturday going to “Hill’s Angel’s: how angry women of New Hampshire saved Clinton.”
Its focus Monday was Mitt Romney’s “make-or-break” campaign in Michigan, while another article summarized the last day of campaigning in the Great Lakes State.
Poll results are rarely shown in Europe, however—drama and conflict are emphasized in most stories.
Feminist Germaine Greer was widely quoted in European newspapers after a Jan. 10 column she wrote for The Guardian attacked Clinton’s near-tears.
“Can the moral of the story be: when you’re up against it, don’t fight back, just cry? As if too many women don’t already use tears as a power-tool,” she wrote.
The English-language version of Spiegel, a German weekly, collected election quotes from Germany’s main newspapers Jan. 10.
“America is confused about its own course,” opined the Süddeutsche Zeitung, which Spiegel described as center-left. “The nation wants to get away from George W. Bush, who continually divided not only the world but also his own people into good and evil and into left and right. But voters are still uncertainly groping for a balance between change and stability — in both parties.”
Die Welt, described as right-leaning, also revealed its view of America between the lines of an editorial.
“While Obama would be unbeatable almost anywhere in Europe, it seems that things are a bit different in once-isolationist America,” it said. “Here, ideas about change for the better and living in peace do not automatically stand in opposition to democracy’s expansive impulse.”
Lastilla also said Bush profoundly impacted the way the election is viewed abroad.
“The Iraq war really damaged the U.S. image in Europe,” he said. “Most Europeans support Obama, because they don’t want someone too similar— a Republican— and Clinton is seen as too much a part of the system.”
While maintaining objectivity in their reporting, other major news outlets in Europe, including networks such as the British Broadcasting Corporation, largely match these papers in their coverage of the election.
Foreign interest in the primaries can sometimes be shockingly different, however.
As we huddled together in a decades-old train with broken windows, an Albanian medical student asked me whether Hillary would win the election. Like many Albanians, his first impression of her came from humanitarian efforts in Kosovo that led the Eastern European country to give the First Lady its highest honor, the Mother Theresa Award, in 1999. Hillary is literally a household name in Albania—the New York Times has reported that Bill and Hillary became two of the country’s most common names during the 1990s.
He knew little more about the other candidates than broad generalizations of their images, but had an avid interest in learning more.
He caught me by surprise, however, with a question seldom discussed in American media.
“Who would be the best [U.S.] president for Albania?” he asked.
That is the kind of question foreign media tries to answer.
01-17-2008
