TWTW: The World This Week / Episode #12
Four days til America votes. So we are devoting all of our TWTW this week to how the world is viewing—or not—this epiphanal electoral moment.
This weekly feature for Andelman Unleashed, explores how the media of other nations are reporting and commenting on the United States, and how they are viewing the rest of the world.
This week coming to you from Paris….as good a spot as any to watch the world watching America.
First our allies….
The British are among the most-focused on our electoral processes. The BBC’s Mike Wendling & Shayan Sardarizadeh are watching “the conspiracy theorists running to control the 2024 vote,” and have found themselves drawn to Nevada: “A coalition of candidates who have falsely claimed the last US election was stolen is running for office—this time in a bid to control the 2024 vote in key swing states.
“The group's founders also have deep connections to another conspiracy theory, QAnon. When Donald Trump called him up onto the stage at a rally in Nevada last month, Jim Marchant seized the opportunity to hammer home his campaign message. ‘We have something in common,’ he told the raucous crowd, with the former president standing beside him. ‘President Trump and I both lost an election in 2020 because of a rigged election.’”
David Charter, Washington correspondent of The Times of London is especially taken by “Donald Trump set to announce he is running for the White House with a series of nationwide rallies days after the midterms….The former president’s closest aides are said to have been in discussions about timings for Trump’s much-anticipated announcement, with November 14 said to be the likely date….Despite the speculation that Trump was eager to wait until after the midterms for his announcement, it would also come days after the wedding of his daughter, Tiffany Trump, in Mar-a-Lago on November 12.”
The London-based Economist believes “the road to Senate control runs through Pennsylvania.” And it adds: “Republicans can probably expect to win a majority in the House of Representatives in the midterm elections. The Senate, currently controlled by Democrats with the thinnest of majorities, is a different story. Our forecast model gives Republicans just a 54% chance of victory. They need to flip a Democratic seat—prospects include Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and New Hampshire—while fending off Democratic challengers in North Carolina and Wisconsin. But the biggest target of all, for both parties, may be Pennsylvania.” Still, the magazine concludes: “There’s a high probability of divided government in the last two years of Biden’s term.”
Across the Channel (or la Manche as the French prefer), Piotr Smolar, veteran Washington correspondent for the Paris daily Le Monde, travels down south to explore how “In Kentucky as in the rest of the United States, the Republicans have gone on a crusade against the schools….In this state, some teachers prefer to resign in the face of pressure from conservatives. Across the country, school issues are more than ever a political issue before the mid-term elections, against a backdrop of exacerbated culture war.” Indeed, cancel culture is very much on Le Monde’s mind—books, especially, and the myriad classrooms and libraries that are editing mercilessly to what ideas their children might be exposed.
Still, in much of the world, there’s not much understanding or even awareness that America, and much of the world, may be facing a turning point on Tuesday. On a swing across the island of Sicily two weeks ago, it was difficult to find a single Italian remotely aware that the U.S. was going to the polls—not surprising. The leading Italian daily, Milan-based Corriere della Sera has not a line on its frontpage and nowhere on its website touching on the mid-terms. The election has been equally ignored all this week by France’s two leading evening television news programs—the Journal du Vingt Heure (News at 8 PM) on TF2 and France 2—until Friday when the latter devoted 30 seconds to Donald Trump, his voice dubbed, telling an audience he would “very very probably” run in 2024.
In Germany, the country’s leading daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung set its Washington correspondent Majid Sattar and his Tokyo counterpart to work on the warning, “America threatens North Korea with the end of [its] regime and warns Pyongyang against using nuclear weapons and wants to send its own to South Korea as a deterrent.”
Deutsche Welle, seeking to explain to its readers what’s at stake, points out that “the US [is] a country split down the middle…a highly polarized country.” Correspondent Ines Pohl warns that the “US midterms [are] also a vote on support for Ukraine.” She’s traveled to northern Ohio to the town of Parma, the largest Ukrainian-American community in America, and to Rudy’s Strudel and Bakery.
“Of course, there is gratitude for everything the US has done to support Ukraine,” Pohl writes.” The owner, Lidia Tempe, tells her that she “hopes [the US] will continue assisting the country. So far, the US has provided the most military and financial support for Ukraine. The White House has promised to keep up its support for as long as necessary. But ahead of the upcoming midterms, this issue has become politicized. More and more politicians say there needs to be a limit to how much support can be provided, given that Americans are facing inflation and rising costs at home. Lidia prefers not to comment on these claims, since she doesn't want to alienate any of her customers.”
Then the neutrals….
Saudi Arabia-based Arab News has chosen to focus on the future, especially Donald Trump, who is “considering launching a fresh White House bid after the elections.” This is the same newspaper that in May 2017 editorialized, “Two Thumbs Up, Mr. Trump….” Then it went on: “Trump will do what he thinks is right….What matters to this part of the world is that we feared a president who would seek to divide us but got one who talked about unity and how standing together will ensure we do not fail.”
Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post reports “US President Joe Biden and Donald Trump launched multi-state campaign blitzes ahead of midterm elections that could end up hobbling the Democrat’s next two years, while setting the stage for a Trump comeback attempt….Biden’s big final push comes on the heels of a speech Wednesday warning that Trump and the increasingly dominant far-right wing of the Republican Party are threatening the survival of US democracy with conspiracy theories aimed at undermining confidence in election results.”
“President Joe Biden had a grim message in an unscheduled speech in Washington: democracy itself and the democratic process is at stake in midterm elections,” writes Nirmal Ghosh, US bureau chief of The Straits Times of Singapore, the accompanying photo suggesting one root of the electoral problems he faces.
Ghosh continues: “Candidates who refuse to accept the results could set the nation on a ‘path to chaos,’ [Biden] warned. But the message is unlikely to move the needle much in a political environment polarized to the extreme with opinions baked in and inflation and the state of the economy at the top of most voters’ minds.”
The closest Egypt’s leading daily, Al Ahram, comes to dealing with November 8 is a report that “President Biden [will] attend COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, traveling to Egypt to participate in the 2022 UN Climate Change Conference (COP27) on November 11.”
Next door in Israel which faced last week its own volcanic election, an analysis by Alan Pinkas in the leading daily Haaretz , observes: “A quasi-fascist, ultra-religious government for a country that deserves better.” He’s not talking about the United States at all, though he might have been, as he continues, “With all the votes counted and the coalition talks starting, a far-right, racist, and corruption-tolerating government is about to take office. Israel isn't a far-right/religious country. But soon it will have a far-right/religious government.”
When he is commenting on American politics, though, as he did in September, Pinkas wrote in Haaretz: “Too much of what's happening in America today isn’t normal…. Democracy can never be taken for granted. In going on the verbal offensive against Trump and his supporters, American democracy is imperiled, under a constant domestic assault against its institutions, traditions, and mores. Joe Biden knew this and made fixing the problem the rationale for his bid for the presidency.”
Finally, our foes….
Hardly surprising, but the Russian news agency RIA Novosti seems incapable of refraining from taking a jab at President Biden, on or off the campaign trail. “Biden, who turns 80 this year, has become the oldest president of the United States in history,” Novosti points out. “He regularly gets into funny situations and makes ridiculous reservations—for example, he repeatedly called his deputy Kamala Harris president, mispronounced the name of Russian leader Vladimir Putin, confused the words ‘vaccination’ and ‘escalation,’ Syria with Libya, and Iran with Iraq and Ukraine.” Then there was the moment, Novosti points out when a “photo of Biden’s hand scared the Americans.”
And Novosti comments on another recent occasion, taken just a trifle out context….=
None of which really mentions the forthcoming elections whatsoever. Indeed, at lunch I had in Paris last week with two leading Moscow journalists who fled their country ahead of threats of imprisonment for their views, both expressed substantial surprise that there was any critical election on the horizon in the US. Clearly, there’s more than enough to keep most broadcasters and reporters occupied closer to home—doing their best to snatch victory in Ukraine, at least in Russian media circles, from the jaws of a looming defeat.
Not so in Beijing where, while hardly top of mind or front-page news, nevertheless, America’s mid-terms are a subject the powers-that-be in Beijing are monitoring. The the organ of the Chinese Communist Party, People’s Daily, reports “With less than one week to go before the 2022 midterm elections in the U.S., politicians have been trolling for votes….The most important issues for Americans are inflation, crime, immigration, and jobs and unemployment. However, U.S. politicians have not responded directly to the American public's priorities during the election campaign and didn't even mention issues such as crime and immigration. It seems that votes, and not the issues that concern voters, are what U.S. politicians care about most.”
Another People’s Daily report focuses on “infighting between the two parties in the United States [that] has intensified. The Republicans' focus on inflation and other economic issues has launched an attack on the Democrats, who have threatened that Republican rule will bring dire consequences. The bipartisan struggle in the United States is further tearing American society apart….US politicians focus all their energy on fighting each other, and it is still a mystery whether the economic, crime rate, immigration, and other livelihood issues that the people care about can be truly resolved….Currently, inflation in the United States is high and prices are soaring. In order to maintain a living standard, many people use credit cards more for consumption, causing them to accumulate more debt. The debt burden has made the local people extremely stressed and complaining.”
And then there’s Ma Hongliang….
The editorial cartoonist of People’s Daily has hardly spared America and its foibles as the mid-term elections approach. Since we are unlikely to re-visit him anytime soon, it’s probably worth looking at a couple of Ma Hongliang’s most virulent takes … a brief break from our regulars at the Cartooning for Peace collective.
Sadly, Ma does not seem to have gotten it at all wrong in the end. That was probably not his intention, however.