As the US electorate prepares to go to the polls Tuesday, American statistics position incumbent President Barack Obama neck-and-neck with his Republican rival Mitt Romney, with the latest Reuters/Ipsos tracking poll positioning the Democrat on 47% with Romney close at his heels with 46%.
Across international waters, the political spectrum appeared similarly divisive, with a survey released last week by British pollsters YouGov claiming that 80% of Europeans would vote for Obama if eligible to cast ballots, whilst a disputed iVoteIsrael-backed survey claiming 85% of Americans living in Israel casted their postal ballots for the Republican candidate.
Obama, who is seen as being staunchly pro-European, and is often criticised as such domestically, has even prompted some of his European counterparts to publicly back him ahead of America’s critical November 6 vote.
In an unprecedented show of support, French Premier Jean-Marc Ayrault went so far as to say he “would not hesitate to vote for Obama” were he a US citizen, whilst Social Democrat leader in the (German parliament) Bundestag Thomas Oppermann similarly described him as “more sympathetic for Europeans” on account of his reluctance to enter into war in international territories.
Pro-Israel Conservative Italian MP Fiamma Nirenstein meanwhile wrote on her blog of the Italian position: “We know Obama. People don’t like him quite as much as we did four years ago, but they still like him.”
Whilst the British Conservative government has not publicly come out in support of either candidate, David Cameron is a known supporter of the National Health Service, one of Obama’s key domestic policies in his first presidential term, in spite of his more obvious sympathies with the right-wing Republican.
Romney further failed to ingratiate himself to the British administration in July, when he said of London’s hosting of the Summer Olympics Games, on a visit to London for the Opening Ceremony, that it was “hard to know just how well it would turn out”.
Further commenting that he saw “a few things that were disconcerting”, his comments played in to the hands of his critics who were already keen to capitalise on his widely-perceived lack of practical foreign policy experience.
However, Europe is seen to be an increasingly junior partner to the US in America’s foreign policy plans, with Obama failing to make significant mention of the importance of EU-US relations in his election campaign, unlike that of 2008.
Such concerns plagued European Parliament members at a plenary session in Strasbourg in September, when Spanish Christian Democrat Jose Ignacio Salafranca questioned “chat credible do we enjoy on the international stage if we fail to solve our internal problems”.
Continuing the charge, Belgian Liberal Democrat Annemie Neyts-Uyttebroek added that the lack of mention of the EU at the National Democratic Convention was an “unfortunate development” suggesting “there is a great deal of work that needs to be done” in order to achieve Europe’s ambition of securing its place as America’s main strategic partner.
The US is still the EU’s most important political and trading partner. EU-US commerce accounts for half of the global trade, with mutually high levels of foreign direct investment, making the transatlantic economic partnership still the deepest in the world.
Meanwhile, an exit poll released Thursday by iVoteIsrael claiming 85% of Americans in Israel had voted for Romney was widely discredited as “unscientific”, as the group has already aroused suspicion over its alleged ties to the Republican’s Conservative backers, including World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder.
Hillel Schenker, chairman of Democrats Abroad Israel, refuted the polls accuracy, insisting: “All they’re doing is providing information about the people they polled at their polling stations, in places where there are predominantly Orthodox and right-wing Jews.”
However, Marc Zell, chairman of the rival group Republicans Abroad Israel claimed his counterpart was “out of touch with reality”, adding that the reported figures were “very much consistent with our own internal polling”.
At a panel discussion on the importance of the US elections to Israel’s own political climate, held at Tel Aviv University Monday, advisor to former Israeli President Ariel Sharon, Dov Weissglas, told attendees “the presidential election is at least as important, maybe even more important, than our election”.
“Our dependence on the U.S. is almost total. Therefore anything and everything which happens in the U.S. is a matter of utmost concern to the State of Israel,” he added.
Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu successfully called for early national elections to be held in Israel, which have since been set for January 22, coming only two days after the inauguration of the US President, following their respective November 6 poll.
The significance of this date has been acknowledged by the Israeli media, particularly in light of Netanyahu’s apparent preference for pro-Israel Romney, who has repeatedly accused Obama of “throwing Israel under a bus” on the international stage. In the second of three presidential debates between the candidates last month, he further contended that the president pursued “a strategy of leading from behind” on the Middle East, as well as deliberately establishing “distance between ourselves and Israel”.
Netanyahu was criticised on home soil for having given a state welcome to the presidential pretender before he has even been elected. Despite, several months ago having insisted in an interview with US Time magazine that his relationship with Romney was not close, he has contradicted this on Romney’s tour, referring to him as “Mitt” and claiming they have been friends for decades. Romney in turn called Netanyahu “my friend”.