European press review

There is an air of fascinated amazement in today's front pages and editorial columns at the sight of the two contestants in the race for the White House freeze-framed within yards of the finishing line.

But life - and death - go on elsewhere, as the French Senate votes to recognise the 1915 killing of Armenians by the Turkish army as genocide.

For a fistful of votes

"Around the globe, an American puzzle", says a headline in the Paris-based International Herald Tribune.

"The world watched, the world waited, the world was extremely puzzled," the paper says.

"Here was the most powerful country on earth in suspended animation.

"In the age of the internet, the age of instant information, the race between Al Gore and George W Bush was frozen by a laborious manual recount involving a few thousand votes."

As Madrid's ABC puts it: "The eyes of an incredulous and astonished world are on the United States, scene of the greatest electoral muddle in the history of a country so attached to its democratic tradition."

The paper believes that yesterday's vote "will go down in the annals of political history to be taught to university students as an object-lesson on how the media can distort reality in their eager pursuit of the big story".

Such sentiments are echoed by La Libre Belgique: "This interminable election may have fulfilled all its promise as a spectacle," the paper says in an editorial, "but it also raises serious questions over the functioning of democracy... the role of the media, and the impact of such an electoral system on the solidity of a mandate gained through the ballot box."

Vienna's Die Presse, on the other hand, calls the events of 7 November "a victory of democracy" and describes this particular race for the White House as "the most exciting election in American history and in the history of modern democracy".

The paper sees a "striking resemblance" between the Gore-Bush duel and Austria's last general elections. But while the pressure of a cliff-hanger vote forced the Austrian chancellor into making "serious political errors", both Bush and Gore "are behaving much more carefully and intelligently".

"Both elections had one thing in common: they proved that the vote of every single citizen counts," the paper says.

Back in Madrid, La Razon, for its part believes that reports of the death of ideology may have been slightly exaggerated.

"The people of the United States have lived this election campaign as a battle of ideologies, a clash of ideas, precisely at a time when everyone thought ideology dead," it says.

On a much different tack, Berlin's Die Tageszeitung says that "not even Hollywood could have done it better", likening the situation to "a scene from an movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, with the hero hanging from a cliff over a huge abyss by one arm".

"In actual fact, the presidential election is having the same effect on many Americans," it says.

But the paper believes that democracy too is hanging over an abyss and fears political confrontation ahead "with as little to do with the country's problems as an action film has with reality".

The Spanish El Pais raised the issue of capital punishment.

It sees "more food for thought" in the fact that, "on the very same glorious day when he may be declared president" George W Bush "will give the go-ahead to another execution in Texas".

"Whoever wins, the death penalty lives on," the paper concludes.

The Hungarian Magyar Hirlap says that the eventual winner "will inherit only half of Clinton's kingdom".

"The population is split right down the middle" and therefore neither candidate can claim to have a mandate. "Neither of the two has entered into a real compromise with the majority of the nation," the paper says.

In Germany, an impatient Frankfurter Rundschau fears that America may be conveying a confusing image.

"The country seems unable to unite and agree on anything, not even on who is to become its next president," the paper says. "Is the USA deeply split or just indecisive?" it wonders.

Recognizing genocide

France's leading daily Le Monde reports the French Senate's historic vote on a bill recognizing the 1915 mass killing of Armenians by the Turks as genocide.

"Armenians present in the chamber sang the Marseillaise and applauded the senators after the vote", the paper says.

It points out that "there was uncertainty until the last moment" as the government, worried that such a vote might "harm France's relations with Turkey", had, "with President Chirac's "blessing", persistently "refused to allow the bill to be put on the Senate's agenda".

"Looming municipal elections were the deciding factor driving right-wing senators to join the Left in demanding an immediate debate on the bill", the paper explains.

The godless cheeseburger

As if the threat of Mad Cow Disease did not suffice to give fast-food addicts pause, a theologian interviewed in the Italian Catholic daily Avvenire denounces that particular fare as "not Catholic".

"People go to a McDonald's for a quick meal, to satisfy their hunger as quickly as possible in order then to do something else," Massimo Salani tells the paper. "The advance of fast-food means complete forgetfulness of the sacred nature of food."

Fast-food culture imported from America reflects the "individualist relationship between man and God initiated by Luther", and is "certainly not a Catholic model", the theologian adds.

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