‘A global joke’: Worldwide glee grows at US election turmoil

Donald Trump’s opponents around the world are reacting with disbelief, barely contained joy and a huge dollop of schadenfreude at the US president’s desperate attempts to cling to power, reports Bel Trew, Middle East correspondent

Exit stage left? Donald Trump leaves the podium after speaking at the White House on Thursday (AP)

Chaos won”, shouted the front page of Turkey’s opposition newspaper Cumhuriyet about the bitter aftermath of the US’s still-contested election.

“Brawl”, roared Iran leading reformist paper Shargh with a photo of the two contenders, their fists in the air.

“What a spectacle!” wrote Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei on Twitter with glee.

Across the world political figures, commentators and everyday citizens have been enthralled by America’s nailbiting and rancorous vote that President Donald Trump has declared fraudulent despite the lack of evidence to back such an accusation.

Since polling stations opened on Tuesday the hashtags #Trump, #Biden and #USElections2020 have been shared globally, illustrating just how pivotal the outcome of the vote is to the world.

But speculation has turned to mockery with a slew of hashtags like #TrumpMeltdown beginning  to trend as the race narrowed to a knife edge in key battleground states and as Mr Trump tweeted in caps “STOP THE VOTE” and “STOP THE FRAUD”. 

Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg, using words Mr Trump has used against her in the past, even replied to his tweets with “Chill Donald, Chill!”

The latest vote tally shows Democrat challenger Joe Biden has a 264 to 214 lead in the electoral college. But he still needs to secure one of Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina or his home state of  Pennsylvania to reach the necessary 270 to win the White House race.

Mr Trump, who must win all four states, has declared that this win was stolen, even though the ballots have yet to be fully counted and the results remain stuck in an excruciating deadlock. His campaign has already requested a recount in Wisconsin and filed lawsuits in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia.  

Worldwide there have been comparisons to the drawn-out debacle of the “hanging chads” in the 2000 election between George W Bush and Al Gore which hinged on Florida and was ultimately decided in Bush’s favour by the US Supreme Court five weeks later.

But as Mr Trump has dug his heels in, reaction has morphed into growing alarm and in some instances a kind of relish, particularly from countries whose leaders are at loggerheads with the incumbent and embattled administration.

Although there was little official reaction from Russia, which has been accused by US intelligence of trying to impact the vote, pro-Kremlin lawmaker Vyacheslav Nikonov, the grandson of Stalin’s foreign minister, gleefully advised Russians to “stock up on popcorn” and watch the show.

Meanwhile in China, which has been a Trump target over both trade and Beijing’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, the editor-in-chief of the state-run Global Times newspaper compared the US elections unrest to “poor countries”, saying it had been “degraded”. The paper ran an opinion piece which summed up the vote in two words “violence, guns”.

Hong Kong’s Ta Kung Pao newspaper, which is controlled by China’s liaison office in the city, meanwhile, called the election “a global joke”.

Chidanand Rajghatta in The Times of India, one of India’s largest dailies, was even more blunt. “The US presidential election is turning into a chaotic farce,” he said in a piece where he accused Trump of spearheading “a coup”.

Across the Middle East from Egypt to the Palestinian Territories, discussions about the US elections have been increasingly dominated by wild speculation about the potential collapse of the democratic system in the country that positions itself as the “leader of the free world”.

After Mr Trump in a televised address late on Thursday once again claimed the vote count was fraudulent and that he had won, Lebanese website al-Akhbar on Friday morning splashed with “Me or chaos!” and a photo of the president punching the air. The accompanying piece mocked the president for allegedly trying to force the vote in his favour via “riots and court battles”.

In Iran, Mr Trump’s staunchest foe, this week conservative daily Khorasan ran with the banner headline “Electoral mess”, while government-run Shahrvand wondered whether “there will be blood”.

In Qatar, one commentator went as far as to say that Washington was “a black hole where hope, optimism, reason and the future go to die”.

Since the civil war there has not been a popular leader in America who is undermining the foundations of the nation by challenging the system itself

Uri Misgave, Haaretz newspaper

In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – Mr Trump's closest ally – has instructed his ministers not to speak about the outcome until the votes are in. But in left-leaning daily Haaretz, Uri Misgave said the US president had “officially declared war on democracy”.

“Since the civil war there has not been a popular leader in America who is undermining the foundations of the nation by challenging the system itself,” he added.

Sever Plocker, a columnist for the mass-circulation Yediot Ahronot daily, meanwhile said regardless of the final outcome of the US election, “the loser is clear: science has lost”.

He said no matter who ultimately won the seat in the White House, half of America’s population “prefer to put their trust in the witch doctor and obsessive fabrication spreader Donald Trump, and not the scientific and medical community”.