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Rivals and enemies of the United States have come together to feast on the messiest American elections in a generation, poking fun at the delay in vote processing and Donald Trump’s claims of election fraud in thinly veiled criticism of Washington’s political activism in the outside.
“What a show!” The Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was crowned. “You say this is the most rigged election in American history. Who says that? The president who is currently in office ”.
With a large dose of schadenfreude, Washington’s fiercest critics declared their deep concern about the US elections and the state of the country’s democracy.
A spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry on Thursday criticized “obvious deficiencies in the US electoral system” and called the framework “archaic.”
“It is a spectacle, it cannot be called anything more than that,” Vyacheslav Volodin, president of the Russian Duma, said earlier this week. “They say it should be seen as a standard for democracy. I don’t think it’s the standard. “
In China, state media savagely attacked the delayed results, with one newspaper writing that the process looked “a bit like a developing country.”
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro could not resist inciting the United States for what he called its “surprising electoral process,” and it seemed so amusing that in a moment he began to sing with an interpretation of the theme song for the Miss Venezuela beauty pageant: “On a night as beautiful as this one, either of us could win,” he crooned, before laughingly adding: “United States. I don’t stick my nose in. “In two recent local elections, he noted, all votes had been counted before 11pm.
When he began a parliamentary campaign in Venezuela this week, Maduro claimed there were important lessons the United States could learn from its elections rather than lecturing the world on democracy. Venezuela was a showcase of “civilized and peaceful” voting using “proven and transparent technology” and biometric voting machines that provided results the same day, he said.
Trump has spent the past two years unsuccessfully trying to overthrow the Venezuelan president, and on a Wednesday night broadcast, Maduro reveled in the electoral turmoil that gripped his northern neighbor.
“The state department publishes statements that say: ‘In this country we do not recognize elections. In that country we don’t like elections. In the other country, we don’t like this or that, ‘”Maduro said, adding that the United States would be better off concentrating on its own problems.
As Trump demanded that states stop counting ballots by mail, the US embassy in Abidjan issued a statement in due course urging the leaders of Côte d’Ivoire to “show commitment to the democratic process and the state of right”. “We also need a statement from Côte d’Ivoire on the US elections,” joked a BBC editor on Twitter.
For many, it was an opportunity to give the United States a taste of their own medicine. “Neither free nor fair,” wrote Margarita Simonyan, the Russian state-backed director of RT, repeating the language of a statement from the UN or the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
And the OSCE itself intervened, with mission leader Michael Georg Link attacking Trump for making “unsubstantiated allegations of systematic deficiencies” and “[harming] public confidence in democratic institutions ”.
The irony did not go unnoticed by many at home. A cartoon by Russian critic Sergei Elkin circulated Thursday, showing an elderly Babushka woman carrying buckets of water alongside a man in a dilapidated town somewhere in Russia. “They still haven’t finished counting in Pennsylvania and Michigan,” says the man. A stray dog walks behind him down an unpaved road.
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