Votes continue to be counted in the U.S. Presidential Election, as the world awaits the results of a tight contest between President Donald Trump and Democratic candidate Joe Biden.
Marc Piasecki | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Global media on Saturday reacted to the ongoing wait for an end to the U.S. presidential race, as vote-counting continued with Democratic nominee Joe Biden inching ever closer to a victory over President Donald Trump.
Biden is currently projected to win 253 electoral votes, just 17 short of the 270 required to secure victory.
The former vice president has expanded his lead in the battleground state of Pennsylvania and is narrowly ahead in both Georgia and Nevada.
Trump, on 214 electoral votes at present, would need to win in four of the five remaining states to secure re-election, according to NBC News. The outstanding states are Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. NBC News has deemed all of them too close to call at this stage.
“I know watching these vote tallies on TV moves very slow, and as slow as it goes, it can be numbing,” Biden said in a speech late Friday night.
“But, never forget the tallies aren’t just numbers they represent votes and voters. Men and women who exercise their fundamental right to have their voice heard,” he said.
Biden called for patience as vote-counting continued four days after the election, while Trump has made baseless claims of voter fraud and his campaign has mounted several legal challenges.
The Associated Press reported on Saturday that the race to the White House hovered in “suspended animation,” attributing the verdict delay to high voter turnout, a “massive” number of mail-in ballots, and a razor-thin margin between the two candidates in some states.
In the U.K., The Times newspaper said on its front page that “history calls” as Biden appeared on course to win the presidency.
The Guardian newspaper’s front page on Saturday simply read: “On the brink.”
It said Biden was now poised to become the 46th president of the U.S. after record turnout and a turbulent presidential election unlike any other.
In France, the daily afternoon newspaper Le Monde suggested Biden was now preparing for victory despite the slowness of the last vote counts.
Germany’s Der Spiegel website on Friday reported that Biden was now clearly ahead in the key battleground states of Nevada and Arizona, opening up a path to victory for the Democratic presidential nominee.
The Japan Times on Saturday led with a headline that queried whether media mogul Rupert Murdoch was “dumping” Trump.
The online news website reported that Fox News and the New York Post, both outlets owned by Murdoch, had started to distance themselves from the incumbent as the election dragged on.
Sticking in Asia, the South China Morning Post published an article in partnership with POLITICO on Saturday that reported Trump was exploring both legal and political “Hail Marys” as options for a comeback appeared to fade.
In Russia, The Moscow Times reported shortly after Election Day that the U.S. appeared to be “more divided than ever.”
