Around the world people were reacting to the news that Barack Obama had been reelected as president of the United States. World leaders generally wished him well, while the international media also seemed pleased with the result. And there were the inevitable celebrations here and there.
Among our international bloggers there were a variety of reactions to the election outcome.
On HuffPost Spain, former Spanish Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez highlighted that Obama got reelected thanks to the Latino vote. And Sebastian Royo, vice-dean of the College of Arts and Sciences of Suffolk University, wrote that he was glad that Obama will start a new term with much more reasonable expectations than four years ago, when his promises of ‘change’ generated frenzied hope that everything was, indeed, about to change.
On HufPost France, Editorial Director Anne Sinclair observed that Obama is the rare Western leader who remained in office after being confronted with the economic crisis. Leaders who shared Obama's table during G8 or G20 meetings during his first term (Nicolas Sarkozy, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Silvio Berlusconi, Gordon Brown) are all long gone.
HuffPost Italia Editorial Director Lucia Annunziata opined that Obama's hard-earned second victory will prove far more substantial than his first one, and will deliver the president a much clearer path for his second term.
On HuffPost Canada, Conrad Black was highly critical of Obama's campaign and ultimately unimpressed by the result: "It was the most expensive, and one of the most uninformative and unintelligent campaigns ever. The incumbent could not stand on his record, and the best candidates of the party out of office did not stand," Black wrote.
And in the UK, writer Nick Purves observed that the challenges which Obama is facing internationally are markedly different from when he first took office. While Obama may hope that winding down the two wars will decrease the tension in the Middle East, Purvus points out that the region looks much different from 2008: sanctions imposed against Iran have led to a diminishing of its threat and the Arab Spring has radically changed both the personnel in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, and also the nature of the region."
For more of the best reaction and news from our international editions, click here.
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