Foreign pundits aim opinions at California politics

PARIS -- You could almost hear the chortling and the hands rubbing together in the newsrooms of Paris, London, Mexico City and other capitals when the story broke: The Terminator, to paraphrase several foreign wits, had become the Running Man.

Roused from the vacation sloth and no-news languor of August, political writers, pundits and other opinionated sharpshooters opened fire on Arnold Schwarzenegger, California's zany recall election and, let's face it, America. They got off a few nasty zingers.

"He is a barely articulate, pumped-up bodybuilder with a cupboard full of skeletons," read the headline in The Guardian, a British newspaper.

Saying Schwarzenegger's candidacy reveals pervasive "desperation in the Golden State," the article described the actor as "the son of a Nazi police chief" and recalled allegations of sexist behavior and his friendship with fellow Austrian and former U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim, who was accused of involvement in Nazi brutality in World War II.

French disdain

Schwarzenegger "talks as if he has just arrived on Austrian Airlines," the article sneered. "His rise to fame owes more to steroids than charm, and he is best known for impersonating a robot." A French commentator opted for more restrained disdain.

"Let's see if Arnold performs well in his role as Governator," Jacques Guyon wrote in La Charente Libre, a regional newspaper in northeast France. "Even if one would have preferred in this role actors with a stronger personality, more subtle, less brutish, such as Sean Penn, Susan Sarandon or Warren Beatty. But what can you do - those folks would never make it in California. Remember, they aligned themselves with 'old Europe' to criticize Bush for making war on Iraq."

The California election spectacle apparently confirms the suspicions of the critics who think Americans can't tell the difference between their movies and their reality -- both of which are seen by many overseas as big, loud and silly.

Nonetheless, the reaction around the world by no means has been uniformly critical or derisive. In places where elections are still dreams deferred, the jokes about the recall don't translate too well.

Anybody can run

"I don't think it's ridiculous," said Li Zhining, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. "You have to realize we live in a country that doesn't have elections. So elections are better than no elections. If anybody can run for office, then that's probably a good thing, too."

Citizens of democracies agreed that it's probably a good idea to spend a lot of time mocking politics elsewhere. It's hard to find a country where the word "circus" has never popped up in reference to an election.

On Saturday, the Mexican newspaper Milenio used the picturesque gallery of California candidates -- adult-film actress Mary Carey, pornographer Larry Flynt, former child star Gary Coleman -- to poke fun at Mexico's history of wild politics.

"The gringos are so jealous," the article joked. "Now they even want to copy the serene, educated and civilized style of our elections!"

Times staff writers Achrene Sicakyuz in Paris, Janet Stobart in London, Ching-Ching Ni in Beijing, Froylan Enciso in Mexico City, Alexei V. Kuznetsov in Moscow, Tyler Marshall in Hong Kong and T. Christian Miller in Bogota, Colombia, contributed to this report.