Europe’s Love Affair with Obama Starts to Cool

As this blog has documented, Barack Obama has received extensive, and mostly positive, coverage in Europe. Just as he is planning a trip to Europe, however, many in the European media are for the first time strongly criticizing some of his policy pronouncements, particularly those seen as signaling a move to the political center for the general election.

After Obama criticized the Supreme Court for ruling against the use of death penalty for child rapists, Germany’s international broadcaster Deutsche Welle reported June 28 that Obama was falling out of favor in Europe:

German media took Obama to task in several editorials over the weekend, but some also urged their readers to see Obama for what he is, "a short-lived darling of the European political salon," as the Düsseldorf Rheinische Post described the candidate's fall from favor.

The Berlin-based newspaper Der Tagesspiegel appealed to Germans and Europeans in general to wake up from their Obamania trance and recognize the truth behind the Democratic candidate's comments.

"So often Europeans told themselves: we are not against America only against George W. Bush. Now that the left-leaning Obama has removed his mask to become a president-in-waiting, many in Europe are beginning to realize that the negative aspects they eagerly attributed to Bush are in fact deeply embedded in the land itself: the death penalty, gun ownership, moral conservatism and a dogmatic belief in its own righteousness."

Obama's support for the death penalty was not the only policy stance to be criticized in the European Press. There was a flurry of adverse reactions to his decision to opt out of the public campaign financing system, his support of gun rights after the U.S. Supreme Court nullified a handgun ban in Washington, D.C., and his pledge to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) that Jerusalem would remain undivided in any Middle East settlement.

In a commentary for the German daily Handelsblatt, Washington correspondent Markus Ziener wrote that Obama’s pivot to the center looked opportunistic, and that Obama was in danger of being labeled as exactly the kind of calculating politician he often criticizes. Ziener gives as examples Obama’s apparent shifts of position on NAFTA, Israel, and wiretapping.

Similarly, in a surprisingly critical op-ed, Halvor Elvik of the Norwegian leftish daily Dagbladet wrote that with his refusal of public campaign funds,

“the political god Obama shows that he is just like other politicians. If he sees an opportunity for a political advantage he will take it, even if it means going back on earlier promises. The last days have seen a spur of these broken promises – on the death penalty, gun control and surveillance.”

Some commentators questioned whether Obama had abandoned all his original values for political gain. In Britain, Dominic Lawson, a columnist for The Independent, asked how anyone could continue to believe in Obama’s lofty calls for a new way of politics after his recent U-turns. Lawson asks, “how do you know what Obama really believes in, other than his own destiny – and, of course, his conscience?”. The same question was raised by Washington correspondent Reymer Klüver in the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung. In a July 4 article, Klüver wrote, “the charismatic Democrat wants to become president at any price, and has abandoned previously held positions and stressed conservative values. That raises the question: what does Obama really stand for?”.