Talk Elections

I know a recent poll showed Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto with a higher approval in the United States than in Mexico. Are there any other world leaders who might be unpopular at home but have a fan base somewhere else?

I'm sure there are some Caribbean and South American countries where Maduro is more popular than he is in Venezuela, especially the places that still enjoy Venezuelan largesse.

Well, here is a US poll from March on various world leaders, and folks like Theresa May and Justin Trudeau seem to rate high enough that it presumably exceeds their numbers in their home countries:

https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=261065.msg5580313#msg5580313

But note that they included the country name in the polling, so they were testing names like “Justin Trudeau, the leader of Canada”.  Thus, many respondents were probably voicing support for the country rather than the person.  If you did this without such prompting, then presumably you run into the problem of leaders getting small #s in foreign countries because of lack of name recognition.

Flawless Beautiful Macron will very soon, if he isn't already.

Macron, May and Merkel are all likely more popular in Canada than in their countries, based on proxy polling we've done in the past.

Israeli leaders have a floor in the US that's higher than the Israeli one -- I distinctly recall polling that showed Ehud Olmert was thought of fairly highly in the US towards the end of his term when he had basically no Israelis left defending him.

Trump in the Philippines.

Does Obama count? I seem to recall he was more popular in the rest of the world than here during his first term.

Macron is at 64% in the latest Ifop approval rating, I don't think he has enough name recognition abroad to surpass 64% (expect maybe in Germany).

Obviously Obama (his approval rating in some European countries was 85% or higher even when he was unpopular in the US). Like other posters said Macron probably will be more popular in Europe than in his own country. His EU plans aren't really popular in a lot of countries though, and that could hurt him with populists (they don't like him anyway) and less EU-enthusiastic centre-right voters. Maybe Merkel during the height of the refugee crisis? And Blair probably was more popular in the US than in his own country after the Iraq war.

Definitely Nieto - I have not met any Mexican who likes him.

Definitely not Shinzo Abe, though people were sympathetic about the hand shake incident with Trump, his political views are much disliked among those outside of Japan

ok, well we did a poll showing Macron beating Le Pen 82-18 here, but over half didn't answer or weren't paying attention to the election.

George W. Bush was probably pretty popular in Africa and Eastern Europe at the end of his administration.  He was greeted quite enthusiastically in Albania. 

George W. Bush: The Norman Wisdom of US Presidents

Yep. Bibi is also much more popular in America than in Israel.

Haile Selassie?

Warsaw street bands had songs about him in the 30s.

How about Rutherford Hayes in Paraguay? That's a classic example.

Maybe Hollande? There has to be a country in Europe where atleast 5% of the population once saw him on tv and decided he was a nice guy.

Huh, interesting! Why so?

Paraguay got devastated in a war (Triple Alliance War) and after the war Argentina claimed some Paraguayan territory. The two sides asked the US to settle the dispute and president Hayes decided in favor of Paraguay. They even named a department after him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidente_Hayes_Department

Theresa May is the only one that comes to mind. I remember seeing a Gallup poll where she had nearly a 60% favorable rating amongst both Democrats and Republicans.

The obvious answer is Trump, who is more popular in at least Russia and Israel than in the United States. (The US President will always qualify for this no matter who they are; Obama was way more popular in Western Europe or Canada than in the US.)

Gorbachev fell under this label during his later years as Soviet leader.