Foreign leaders show favoritism in U.S. election

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Russian President Vladimir Putin likes President Bush, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il leans toward Democratic challenger Sen. John Kerry and Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe sees little to like in either U.S. presidential candidate.

They can't vote Tuesday, but a surprisingly large number of world leaders have dropped the traditional stand of neutrality in another country's affairs to state their preference in the U.S. vote.

And despite Mr. Kerry's claim early in the campaign that many leaders abroad have told him they want him to win, the president holds his own in an informal survey of his peers.

"We hope and believe the next president will again be Bush," Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a staunch backer of the U.S.-led mission in Iraq, told reporters last week.

Mr. Putin sharply clashed with Mr. Bush over Iraq, but now says the defeat of the U.S. president would be a defeat for the global war against terrorism.

"International terrorists have set as their goal inflicting the maximum damage to Bush, to prevent his election to a second term," Mr. Putin said during a summit in Tajikistan Oct. 18.

"If they succeed in doing that, they will celebrate a victory over America and over the entire anti-terror coalition," he said.

Mr. Bush might even win a private poll of the leaders of the Group of Eight industrial nations, with Mr. Berlusconi, Mr. Putin and Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi firmly in his camp and British Prime Minister Tony Blair -- Mr. Bush's closest ally in the Iraq war -- declining to state publicly a preference.

Leaders of the other G-8 nations -- France, Germany and Canada -- have opposed major portions of Mr. Bush's foreign policy, but none has gone so far as to endorse Mr. Kerry.

Mr. Koizumi, who defied Japanese public opinion to dispatch troops to Iraq, said this month, "I don't want to interfere in an election in a foreign country, but I would like President Bush to hang in there, because he is a close friend."