Obama most popular leader in the world… in six countries
Just a suggestion to Radio France International, if you’re going to release a poll claiming to show the "world’s most popular leaders," you might want to poll people in more than six countries, or maybe even one or two outside of Europe and North America. In any event, in the countries that were polled — ...
Just a suggestion to Radio France International, if you're going to release a poll claiming to show the "world's most popular leaders," you might want to poll people in more than six countries, or maybe even one or two outside of Europe and North America.
Just a suggestion to Radio France International, if you’re going to release a poll claiming to show the "world’s most popular leaders," you might want to poll people in more than six countries, or maybe even one or two outside of Europe and North America.
In any event, in the countries that were polled — Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United States — Barack Obama came in first, followed by the Dalai Lama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Muammar Qaddafi and Hu Jintao were the least popular, though I suspect at least a few hundred million Chinese people might feel differently about that.
(For the record, I’m not saying Obama isn’t the most popular — larger surveys have shown that too — just that Western Europe isn’t "the world.")
Joshua Keating was an associate editor at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @joshuakeating
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