Notable for their expressions of admiration for how the U.S. midterm elections demonstrate the healthy workings of democracy, these two articles from Eastern Europe, one from Poland and the other from Romania, disagree on the staying power and intelligence of the Tea Party platform.
According to columnist Marek Magierowski of Poland’s Rceczpospolita, the 2010 midterm election results are a sign that American voters are smarter than their European counterparts. Magierowski writes in part:
Obama promised Americans both hope and change, and lots of other miracles too. He was convinced that pushing through historic health reform legislation through Congress would earn him the undying gratitude of his fellow citizens. And he tried to bury all the day-to-day problems of ordinary citizens under billions of speedily printed dollars.
It’s too early to assess whether Obama’s social-democratic experiment will succeed in the United States. For the time being, U.S. voters have demonstrated common sense and decided that the more government intervention, so much the worse it is for them. Unfortunately in Europe, “Big Government” still prevails. Obama would feel quite at home here.
On the other hand, columnist Cristian Pirvulescu of Romania’s Romanian Libera, in an article headlined Tea Party Activists Reflect America’s Checks and Balances, seeks to explain the U.S. election results to Romanian readers and writes that while the emergence of the Tea Party is a reflection of healthy democratic checks and balances, the movement has little chance of enduring because it has a platform that no sane politician is likely to espouse:
As a result of Tuesday’s elections, Republicans are obliged to assume an element of government and can no longer benefit from the advantage of being in opposition. For although it is a presidential system, the midterm elections provide the American form of government with a mechanism of checks and balances. This happened in 1994 with Clinton and 2006 with Bush. And for the most part, Obama has passed his economic and social program, even if his liberal critics accuse him of excessive compromise on health and financial reform. He managed to do what no other progressive president has – from Roosevelt onwards. Indeed, in terms of health insurance, even Roosevelt had failed.
Now, after the Republican success, Obama must now defend his intelligent reforms. The “winners” have no coherent program and are ideologically divided. Because aside from espousing libertarian stereotypes that no rational politician could possibly take seriously and which perfectly reflect age-old White Anglo-Saxon Protestant ideology – and a nearly undisguised revanchist racism – the Tea Party is doing nothing other than compromising the idea of responsible government.”
READ MORE AT WORLDMEETS.US, your most trusted translator and aggregator of foreign news and views about our nation.
Founder and Managing Editor of Worldmeets.US