Postcards from Pétainistan

Europeans speculating on Tuesday’s vote in the US fall into the old trope: either way they will pity themselves, either way Americans are wrong, either way they lose, either way they are disappointed that the US election is not all about them.

EU Observer features an item that they had hastily re-written to remove any reference to the fact that relations US-European have gotten worse because of Obama:

EU onlooker wary of introspective US vote

And why is this important to Americans voting on their own representation in Washington?

EU relations and foreign affairs in general are playing hardly any role in the US midterm elections on Tuesday (2 November), the European Parliament's top man in Washington has said. But any deficit in EU-US relations will have an associated "cost," he warned.

This in spite of the fact that the expected outcome will blunt the power of the left, a party that supported a president who snubbed European government heads and sent a bust of Churchill, the symbol of the strong bonds built between the US and the UK, BACK.

The EU has for a long time fretted about whether or not it has its due weight on Capitol Hill.

Join the club. Americans are asking themselves that very question right now as well.

The climate change talks in Copenhagen last year, when the US left the EU out of the final deal-making, and President Obama's abrupt cancellation of a summit in Madrid earlier this year, deepened anxieties. An EU-US will now take place in Lisbon on 20 November, on the margins of a bigger Nato event which President Obama was to attend anyway.

Then again this will go into my bulging “whose country is this anyway?” file:

"There is a disappointment in Europe that on on many issues he didn't make a u-turn on policies from the Bush era, as the EU would have liked," Ms Guerot added.

What does it all boil down to? Self-serving narcissism. The “onlooker” seems disappointed that the EU’s interests don’t dominate the US’ internal affairs.