The nail-biting US presidential election extended into early Wednesday, as the rest of the world contemplated the reality of President Donald Trump in the White House.
Before Hillary Clinton conceded the race, a senior member of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government said the geopolitical situation was “very uncertain.”
“We’re realizing now that we have no idea what this American president will do if the voice of anger enters office and the voice of anger becomes the most powerful man in the world,” Norbert Roettgen, a member of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and head of the German parliament’s foreign affairs committee, said on Deutschlandfunk radio.
French Ambassador to the U.S. Gerard Araud spoke of a new world order. “After Brexit and this election, everything from now on is possible,” he tweeted. “A world is collapsing before our eyes. Vertigo.”
“It’s the end of an era, that of neoliberalism. What will succeed it, is yet to be known,” Araud said in another tweet. Both tweets were later deleted.
China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency said the campaign highlighted that “the majority of Americans are rebelling against the U.S.’s political class and financial elites.”
The official Communist Party newspaper People’s Daily said in a commentary that the 2016 race revealed an “ill democracy.”
Meanwhile Russian President Vladimir Putin formally congratulated Donald Trump on his surprise victory in the U.S. presidential election, the Kremlin said Wednesday.
Putin said he hoped “for cooperation in ending a crisis in Russian-American relations,” according to the text of the message, which was made available on the Kremlin website.