European press review

Time will tell if President Bill Clinton's triumphal welcome by the ordinary Vietnamese will earn him a place in the history books. For now it has at least earned him a great many column-inches in today's papers. The Florida stalemate, by now something of a regular fixture, also arouses much comment. And the beef is still off.

Good evening Vietnam!

Luxembourg's Tageblatt reports that President Bill Clinton and his family were welcomed in Hanoi on Thursday evening "by an enthusiastic crowd of tens of thousands" who "had waited for several hours along the motorcade's route to the hotel".

"Apotheosis Now!", says the headline in the French Liberation, striking a contrast with what was apocalypse then, over a full front page colour photo of an enthusiastic crowd. Hanoi "failed in its attempt to give the event a low profile", the paper says in another headline.

"Only a man like Bill Clinton could get away so deftly with concluding his two terms with a visit to the setting of the bloodiest and most traumatic war since World War II," says a columnist in Turin's La Stampa.

Looking ahead into the three-day visit, the Belgian Le Soir calls it "a delicate balancing act".

For one thing, "there is no question" of an apology for the war, because "the families of the 58,000 GIs who died far away from home, are fiercely against it," the paper says.

Nor will President Clinton "be able to raise certain issues over which Hanoi is particularly sensitive, such as democracy, human rights, and religious freedom".

But the balancing act works both ways: With Congress yet to approve last July's agreement on cutting trade tariffs, "this is hardly the time for Hanoi to ruffle American feathers", the paper points out.

"This probably explains why Bill Clinton has been spared the humiliation of visiting the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum, symbol of the communist struggle," it adds.

Meanwhile, back home...

Under the headline "A fiasco", Germany's Die Zeit writes that the US political climate has become poisoned by Florida's election recount saga, even though Americans themselves seem remarkably sanguine about the whole business.

"What is regarded as a debacle abroad has proved a winner in America's TV ratings - it has topped the death of Lady Di, the Kosovo war and the Lewinsky scandal," the paper says.

Following what the paper describes as a "crazy week" after the "craziest election" in America's history, "a weary, pre-Christmas anticipation envelops the country", it adds. "We will have to get through two more days and then we will have a president. Maybe."

Berlin's Tageszeitung finds it ironic that hundreds of legal experts have descended on Florida to influence the outcome of the elections when "there is no professional group Americans despise more than lawyers".

It points to the need for neutral courts in a situation where "Bush wants to halt the recount so as not to lose his slim majority, while Gore hopes to forge a majority out of the votes declared null and void".

"But the authorities, especially Florida's Secretary of State and its self-styled election officer Katherine Harris, have failed abysmally in this respect," the paper says. "The Republican Harris is acting in such a blatantly partisan manner that any pretence is futile."

Still in Germany, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung believes that the Florida recount shows George W Bush to be far from the force for reconciliation that he liked to portray himself as during the election campaign.

Commenting on the Republicans' moves to block a manual recount, the paper warns that Bush will never live down the suspicion that he did so in a bid to protect his hairbreadth's lead.

"Any victory obtained in such an underhand way is worthless," the paper says. "A president with feet of clay will not be taken seriously outside the USA either," it concludes.

A few votes short of a full ballot box?

It's not so much Mr Bush's feet as the opposite end that concern the French Le Monde.

The paper wonders "how a candidate... who displays limited intellectual capacity and seems unable to write - and even read - a grammatically-correct page, can be where he is today".

"It would be too facile to mock the naivety of the electorate," the paper says. "Most of the country... knows nothing of this facet of the Republican candidate" because "the popular media has systematically overlooked it".

Not content with this, the same media are now "using the image of the United States in the foreign press... as an argument to urge public pressure on Al Gore" to concede defeat, the paper says.

But "we can bet that the international media will vie among themselves in the irony stakes... if the president-elect turns out to be the global village idiot", it concludes.

Once more into the breach?

The French Le Nouvel Observateur says - with a nod of approval - that President Bill Clinton, "is more concerned with the disastrous Middle East situation than with his compatriots' difficulties in picking his successor".

The paper believes that, even with his term running out of time, he must not give up his bid to salvage the peace process.

The whole region is watching "with dread" as the Palestinians "reach a point when there is a general desire for a full uprising", it points out. President Clinton "cannot stand aloof... especially now that it is imperative to avert a civil war and a regional flare-up".

He is particularly well-qualified as a mediator, for "no other occupant of the White House ever got so close to the Arabs and the Palestinians without being rebuffed by the Israelis and the American Jews".

Psychosis or common sense?

In the aftermath of the French government's ban on animal meal and beef on the bone earlier this week, the French weekly L'Express wonders why it took so long.

"Is it not too late?" the weekly asks. "Because the truth, as all scientists and politicians know, is that animal meal and livestock were imported from Britain ... when the BSE epidemic was at its height there" and therefore, "except for the strictest vegetarians, we have all consumed the bovine prion" that carries the disease.

The paper takes exception to the authorities description of the public's fears as a "psychosis".

"Is the public's anxiety over the almost daily reports of new cases of Mad Cow Disease in France an exaggerated reaction, or rather the effect of the sudden perception of a danger so long denied?" it asks.

In space the euro doesn't fall

Germany's Die Welt says that having played second fiddle to the USA and Russia in space projects, Europeans have now suddenly discovered the great strategic importance of manned space flight.

"The capacity for space missions affects not just the economy and jobs but science, politics, and not least, the military," the paper says. It adds that the Kosovo war "made the EU painfully aware that it had inadequate spy stations in space."

The "litmus test of Europe's emancipation in space", will be whether or not it decides to build the "Galileo" satellite navigation system in the face of American objections, the paper says.

Sick as a parrot?

Austria's Die Presse says that the resignation of German Transport Minister Reinhardt Klimmt following his conviction on fraud charges involving a soccer club, has come "a little too late to prevent the country's red-green government from sustaining serious political damage".

It notes that Chancellor Schroeder has been anything but lucky with the choices for his cabinet team. "After Oskar Lafontaine, Bodo Hombach and Franz Muentefering, Klimmt has become the fourth minister to throw in the towel in only a year and a half," it points out.

The paper explains that Mr Klimmt was convicted as an accessory to embezzlement in the channelling of funds from a medical charity to second division FC Saarbruecken, the football club of which he was honorary president.

The European press review is compiled by BBC Monitoring from internet editions of the main European newspapers and some early printed editions.