European press lambasts U.S. poll confusion

European editors are condemning the confusion surrounding the U.S. presidential election

LONDON, England (CNN) -- Europe's press continues to be dominated by the uncertainty surrounding the outcome of the U.S. Presidential election, with many newspapers ridiculing the voting system underlying America's democracy.

Rome-based La Repubblica says in its Friday edition that the 2000 election has become another nemesis in U.S. history alongside Vietnam.

It changed its earlier description of the elections from a "comedy of errors" to a "Vietnam of U.S. election politics."

It added: "The institutional crisis has become all too apparent: whoever wins this election will be seen by a majority of the voters as a usurper."

Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung likened the scenario to the Balkans, the European battleground for partisan ethnic groups in which the U.S. stepped in to try and resolve during the 1990s.

"In Florida, the sunshine state of retirees, Cuban exiles and millions of Disney World visitors, America has seen the beginning of its own Balkans scenario," the paper says.

Under the headline "ambulance chasers on their way to the U.S. Balkans," it also reports on the hordes of lawyers who have "swooped down on the southern state to make sure that votes are being recounted properly."

The left-leaning French daily, Libération, was openly teasing, writing: "America awoke Wednesday morning to discover that it didn't have an elected President and that the November 7 election had devolved into a mix of banana-republic farce and suspense worthy of a World Cup (football) final decided on penalty kicks."

The right-wing British paper The Daily Mail blazoned its front page with "What a Mickey Mouse way to run a country."

It was not shy in using one of Florida's most famous residents to deride "the country that prides itself as the bastion of democracy."

It said: "Fittingly, the crisis that is beginning to make the U.S. the world's laughing stock is centred on the Mickey Mouse state of Florida, home to Disney World."

One of Spain's leading newspapers, El Pais, places the U.S. electoral college method of electing a President firmly in the 18th Century.

El Pais criticises the electoral system as essentially an indirect vote -- a method too outdated and too undemocratic for modern voters.

"Maybe the conclusion is that an electoral system born in the 18th Century need not be a model written in stone and applied in the 21st Century," says El Pais in its editorial.

The British broadsheet The Independent dwells on the affect legal haggling is having on the U.S. itself, running the headline "The Disunited States of America".

Repubblica (in Italian)
El Pais (In Spanish)
Daily Mail
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
Libération
Independent

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