Elections from the point of view of United Kingdom, Germany and France

Hello everybody!

The goal of Intercultural competence implies the idea of understanding the differences and similarities among a number of countries, not only between U.S.A and Italy. For this reason, I’ve looked for different points of view and ways to present the topic of Italian and American elections in three foreign newspapers (in their online version): The Times, Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung and Le Figaro. In this way I wanted to compare the importance given by European countries to this two elections and I admit that I didn’t like so much the result! I discovered indeed that these three newspapers don’t give importance to Italian political situation while they give a lot of space to the American elections. I admit that this is quite comprehensible because U.S.A has an important role for all the world while Italy a is not so important, but I thought that they give importance to Italian elections because it is an European country. I was wrong!

The French newspaper Le Figaro has a special section called “élections USA 2008” through which you arrive on a web page with a number of information, videos, surveys and so on but you can find it under “international”. The German Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has a special section, too under “Politics”. It calls “Wahl in America” and here you find a table with the primaries’ results and a lot of other information. In the English The Times, under “World news”, there are sections called “US elections” and I found only one article about the fight between Berlusconi and Veltroni. In Le Figaro the latest article about Italy regards the decision of Prodi to leave Politics and it is dated 03-11-2008.

As far as images are concerned I noticed that Le Figaro and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung have an image for each article, while The Times has an image only for the first article of the page, while many of the others have not. All these three newspapers use the same kind of images that is the faces of the candidates: obviously it is quite normal in political campaigns because people have to know the candidate and it is thus important their face.