As the results from the U.S. presidential elections come in, countries around the world are watching and waiting.
From Russia, the Moscow Times brings a selection of comments from politicians and public figures in response to the latest developments, as of Wednesday midday (Russian time).
“Biden might get a lot of votes, but Donald Trump will still emerge the winner,” said Vladimir Zhirinovisky, leader of the nationalist opposition Liberal Democratic Party of Russia. Why is Zhirinovisky so confident? “Trump will … win because he’s done more for Americans than any president before him … and consider that he faced obstruction from the very first day,” he said, adding that, “People are tired of anarchy throughout the country … America is experiencing the same turmoil – pogroms, looting, and violence – that we in Russia lived through 400 years ago.”
Commenting on Trump’s opponent, Zhirinovsky noted that, “Every American sees that Biden has certain health issues. It’s not his fault.”
In a reference to ongoing allegations of Russian interference in U.S. presidential elections, dating back to the previous contest in 2016, Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the upper house Federation Council Committee on Foreign Affairs, said:
“[Russia] benefits from any certainty in which the losers won’t need to resort to [claims of] foreign interference. It’s time that American returned to the politics of sanity, in which we will always support it.”
He added that, “The subject of some kind of Russian interference – never convincingly proven but enough to permanently attack [Trump], has remained at center stage in American realities since the 2016 election … However, it seems that the foreign factor may not play the same role [this time]. This means that any winner or loser … will be forced to talk about purely domestic reasons for the outcome of the election, and that’s a completely different story that’s much closer to reality.”
According to the leader of the Russian Communist Party, Genady Zyuganov, the elections have shown that “American is more divided than ever … The situation is extremely fraught and the conflict will build up, in my opinion, while I’m afraid anarchy will take hold in some cities, as we’ve seen.”
He added that, “I think that Biden, seeing that he is losing, might call for mass unrest. The situation is heating up.”
And on Russian-American relations, he reflected that, “Between the two, Biden will be even more aggressive [than Trump].”
Sergei Mironov, an opposition party leader of the Just Russia faction, agreed that, “It’s a split, and sadly, I think it won’t settle down for quite a while.
“In plain Russian,” he added, “one [candidate] is as bad as the other. Whether Trump or Biden wins, unfortunately, they’re both pursuing their narrow national interests … which doesn’t bode well for Russia.”
In an intriguing statement, he said that “We’re seeing something astonishing – the boomerang of so-called color revolutions that the United States has launched is coming home. I think that after the results are declared, someone might want to use these homespun techniques of color revolutions at home in the United States.”
And Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader who almost died after an attempt to poison him, widely attributed to President Vladimir Putin, summed up what a lot of us are thinking.
“Woke up to check who won on Twitter. Still unclear. Now that’s what I call elections.”