Harris a well known figure among Europe's power elite, but leaders taking wait-and-see approach

President Joe Biden’s dramatic decision to abandon his quest for a second term has sent ripples across the world – including in Europe where Vice President Kamala Harris, now Biden’s most likely replacement, so far remains enough of an unknown that leaders and others in the region are largely taking a wait-and-see approach. 

Biden made the stunning call to pull out of the 2024 race while recovering from COVID-19 at his Delaware Beach house and days after confusing the names of Harris with GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, then referring to Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy as “President Putin."

To be sure, Harris is well known in European halls of power after multiple meetings with European heads of government and state in Washington and in their own countries.

She attended last year’s COP-28 global climate summit, represented the U.S. at this year’s Munich Security Conference and then filled in for Biden at the 2024 Ukraine summit in Switzerland. Harris is still a relatively unknown commodity, with Bloomberg reporting that most European leaders were still trying to “size up” Harris, as the Democrat Party coalesces around her as their preferred presidential nominee.

However, some polling in Europe shows one-third of residents have no opinion on Harris. And in Germany, a single half-hour news report on the developments in the U.S. pronounced the for senator and California attorney general’s first name three different ways (for the record, the correct pronunciation is “COM-mah-la”). 

Broadly speaking, Trump has never been as popular in Europe as he is in his home country. So it’s unsurprising that most European leaders have expressed support for the outgoing Biden. Those included social media posts from newly-elected British Prime Minister Kier Starmer, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Emmanuel Macron of France, and Zelenskyy from Ukraine. 

There were also notable remarks from Trump supporters in Europe, including leading British opposition figure Nigel Farage, who opined that “Whoever [the Democrats] pick, Trump will win in November.”

Hungarian leader Viktor Orban, who personally visited Trump in Mar-al-Lago after the recent NATO summit in Washington, D.C., said in a television interview that Trump was an “unstoppable force.” 

In Russia, Dmitry Peskov brushed off questions about Harris in a press conference, saying she had made “no discernable contribution to relations with Moscow beyond some unfriendly rhetoric.” 

But most leaders who mentioned Harris by name did so in the context of vowing to work with either a Trump or the Biden administration. 

(There was one notable exception to that rule: European Economy Commissioner Paolo Gentiloni, who posted a photo on Instagram showing a Kamala Harris figurine he said he kept on his desk in Brussels.)

Politico in Europe said that Harris’ foreign policy was likely to mirror that of the Biden administration, including continuing support for Ukraine, playing tough with China, and rebuking Israel’s handling of aid to Gaza.

But some worry about her relative lack of international experience: “She really doesn’t have a background in defense of foreign policy,” the article quoted former Pentagon and NATO official Jim Townsend as saying.

Some European media reports have been less kind to the 59-year-old Harris, with Italy’s Corriere della Sera’s coverage of the saying “many don’t consider her ready” and said her selection was “unconventional.”  

Le Monde, in France, called the Biden-to-Harris transition “less than ideal.”

But the most damning critique of the likely Democratic nominee was in London’s Daily Telegraph, which called Harris “incompetent and deeply weird” as rumors of Biden dropping out swirled and then, after Biden’s withdrawal was announced, calling her “the giggling fool who will doom America.”