The Latest: Japan sends envoy to US to meet new leaders
 AP Photo/Vincent Yu |
MEXICO CITY (AP) — The latest on world reaction to the U.S. election (all times EST):
2:45 a.m.
Japan is sending a top official to Washington to try to meet with those who will be responsible for the next White House administration.
Katsuyuki Kawai, a political aide to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in charge of diplomacy, told reporters after meeting with Abe that he had been instructed to visit Washington as early as next week.
Abe’s instruction came when results showed Republican candidate Donald Trump with a clear lead. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said it was not because Japan was unprepared for Trump’s win.
He said: “We have been preparing so that we can respond to any situation because our stance is that our alliance with the U.S. remains to be the cornerstone of our diplomacy whoever becomes the next president.”
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2:35 a.m.
The leader of Russia’s nationalist Liberal Democratic party, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, has welcomed the presumed victory of Donald Trump.
According to the Interfax news agency, Zhirinovsky said: “We of course regard with satisfaction that the better candidate of the two presented to the American voters was victorious.”
He also said that he hopes the presumed Trump victory means that U.S. Ambassador John Tefft departs. He says, “We hope that this ambassador leaves Russia … he hates Russia.”
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2:30 p.m.
Canada and the prospect of Americans moving there appears to have drawn so much online interest that it has knocked out the country’s immigration website.
Searches for “move to Canada” and “immigrate to Canada” spiked Tuesday night as election returns favored Republican nominee Donald Trump. “Canada” was a leading U.S. trend on Twitter, with more than 1 million tweets.
While much of the chatter was clearly tongue-in-cheek, the website for Citizenship and Immigration Canada was down at the same time. Agency officials could not be immediately reached for comment.
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2:25 a.m.
German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen calls the strong vote for Donald Trump “a big shock,” and the U.S. elections “a vote against Washington, against the establishment.”
Von der Leyen said on German public Television Wednesday that while many questions remain open, “We Europeans obviously know that as partners in the NATO, Donald Trump will naturally ask what ‘are you achieving for the alliance,’ but we will also ask ‘what’s your stand toward the alliance.'”
The defense minister said that behind the scenes the German government would try to make contacts on the working level to find out who are the new contact persons.
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2:10 a.m.
The first French presidential candidate to comment on the U.S. election was populist, anti-immigrant politician Marine Le Pen, congratulating Trump even before the final results are known.
Le Pen, hoping to ride anti-establishment sentiment to victory in April-May French presidential elections, tweeted her support to the “American people, free!”
French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said France would continue to work with the new president whoever wins the final tally, though expressed concern about Trump’s lead and said it could hold a cautionary message for Europe.
“We don’t want a world where egoism triumphs,” Ayrault said on France-2 television Wednesday. France’s Socialist government had openly endorsed Clinton.
Ayrault said European politicians should pay attention to the message from Trump voters. “There is a part of our electorate that feels … abandoned,” including people who feel “left behind” by globalization, he said.
He said a Trump victory could bring “more incertitude” to French politics.
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1:50 a.m.
Indonesians on social media are questioning why Americans have voted in big numbers for billionaire Donald Trump, who many in the world’s most populous Muslim country perceive as intolerant and reactionary.
Twitter, Facebook and chatrooms in instant messaging apps are buzzing with speculation about whether Trump would follow through on campaign rhetoric that included a ban on Muslims entering the U.S.
Some people say that under a Trump administration they fear they’ll be prevented from visiting relatives and friends who live in America or traveling there as tourists.
About 100,000 Indonesians live in the United States.
President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo says on national television that his government will work with whoever becomes president.
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1:45 a.m.
News of Trump’s widening lead hit hard in Cuba, which has spent the last two years negotiating normalization with the United States after more than 50 years of Cold War hostility.
Normalization has set off a tourism boom in Cuba and visits by hundreds of executives from the U.S. and dozens of other nations newly interested in doing business on the island. Trump has promised to reverse Obama’s opening with Cuba unless President Raul Castro agrees to more political freedom on the island, a concession considered a virtual impossibility.
Speaking of Cuba’s leaders, Communist Party member and noted economist and political scientist Esteban Morales told the Telesur network that “they must be worried because I think this represents a new chapter.”
Carlos Alzugaray, a political scientist and retired Cuban diplomat, said a Trump victory could, however, please some hard-liners in the Cuban leadership who worried that Cuba was moving too close to the United States too quickly.
While many Cubans were unaware of the state of the race early Wednesday morning, those watching state-run Telesur or listening to radio updates said they feared that a Trump victory would mean losing the few improvements they had seen in their lives thanks to the post-detente tourism boom.
“The little we’ve advanced, if he reverses it, it hurts us,” taxi driver Oriel Iglesias Garcia said. “You know tourism will go down. If Donald Trump wins and turns everything back it’s really bad for us.”
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1:10 a.m.
A couple of Chinese participants at a U.S. Embassy event in Beijing say they’d welcome a Trump presidency, while another says he thinks the Republican candidate projects a flawed image of the United States.
Blogger Wang Yiming says he hopes Trump will win because the Republican Party has been typically more willing to demonstrate American leadership globally, and he hoped a Republican president would do more to encourage freedom of speech in China.
Wang says: “I think America has stagnated and Trump represents justice, the rule of law and personal freedom.”
Lou Bin, a 43-year-old academic at a university in Beijing, says he didn’t support either candidate but Trump didn’t come across as much of a “gentleman.” He says: “As president you want someone who represents the country’s image.”
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1 a.m.
Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop says at this stage, it would appear that Donald Trump is most likely to claim the presidency.
Bishop told reporters in Canberra, Australia’s capital, that her government is ready to work with whomever the American people, “in their wisdom,” choose to be their president.
She says a U.S. presidential election is always a momentous occasion, and in this instance, “it has been a particularly bruising, divisive and hard-fought campaign.”
She also says the new administration will face a number of challenges, including in Asia-Pacific, and Australia wants to work constructively with the new administration to ensure the continued presence and leadership of the United States in the region.
She calls the U.S. “our major security ally” and the largest foreign direct investor and the second-largest trading partner.
She says: “The United States is also the guarantor and defender of the rules-based international order that has underpinned so much of our economic and security issues. And interests.”
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