"Europeans tend to attribute the rift between the U.S. and Europe essentially to one man and one administration, and to believe that the mere election of a different president would mend the relationship quickly," he added. "Unfortunately, the reasons for the current Atlantic divide are deeper and more complex."

Some countries, like Poland, which has committed troops to the war in Iraq, have their own reasons for wanting Mr. Bush to succeed.

"Given that the Polish fate in Iraq is linked with President Bush and his policies, there are more sympathies on the Bush side," said Jacek Saryusz-Wolski, a former European affairs minister who is running for the European Parliament. "We think he's been a decisive and courageous president."

But on the whole it is hard to find unreserved enthusiasm for Mr. Bush in Europe. Not that Senator Kerry is seen as particularly dynamic or gifted, or even as especially likely to solve all of America's foreign-policy problems. But he has one irresistible attraction: his non-Bushness.

Europeans' objections to Mr. Bush are multifaceted. Some are still obsessing about stolen elections and hanging chads. Others cannot get past the president's plain-spoken manner, his proudly aggressive anti-intellectualism, his ties to the religious right and his tendency in public to trip over words and concepts.

The criticism can be expressed in ways that are exceptionally disparaging of an American president.

The Express, a British tabloid, for instance, ridiculed Mr. Bush's news conference last month in an article titled, "The President's Brain Is Missing," saying his performance had revealed him as a "bumbling embarrassment."

The paper printed a series of unflattering photographs showing Mr. Bush's various facial expressions after a reporter asked whether he had made mistakes since the Sept. 11 attacks. "In what was meant to be a rallying defense of the war," the caption read, "George Bush appears alternately flummoxed, panicked, forgetful and distant as he struggles to remember what he's been doing in Iraq for the past year."

But beyond distaste for Mr. Bush's personal style are serious questions about what Europeans see as his American-centric, us-or-them worldview.

These began soon after Mr. Bush took office, when he diverged from the European position on a host of international treaties. Then came Sept. 11, the conflict with Iraq, the subsequent backpedaling about the rationale for entering the war and, now, the prisoner abuse scandal.

"The thing that Europeans cannot understand is how you can vote for a liar," said Peter Schneider, a German essayist and novelist. "Here is somebody who lies about something that leads to a war where tens of thousands of people's lives are involved."

Nor are Europeans thrilled about the American values they feel Mr. Bush has encouraged, in which anti-Europeanism is applauded as a virtue, people boycott French wine in protest at the French position on Iraq and Senator Kerry is ridiculed by the Republicans for being able to speak French.

"The idea that you have a leader of the U.S. who's not interested in listening to his allies is important in the way people perceive Bush," Guillaume Parmentier, director of the French Center on the United States at the French Institute of Foreign Relations, said in an interview. "He has a very simplistic view of the world, which we find difficult to accept. In fact, that we find dangerous."

In Moscow, the political commentator Aleksandr Yanov said Mr. Kerry was a superior candidate for many reasons, high among them that he appears to have a far more nuanced view of the world.

Writing in Nyezavisimaya Gazeta, Mr. Yanov said, "In contrast to Bush, he will never put the Bolshevik principle - 'Those who are not with us are against us' - at the center of his policy."

Nick Clegg, a British Liberal Democrat who is a member of the European Parliament, said it was "difficult to exaggerate" the European hope that President Bush would lose the election - particularly in Brussels, whose multilateral ethos is mightily offended by Mr. Bush's unilateralism.

"At the moment, a consideration or analysis of Kerry's positions is pretty underdeveloped," Mr. Clegg said in an interview. "Partly, it's because it's still early days and he hasn't revealed his hand fully. But what really drives people is alarm about George Bush's policies, more than some overwhelming attraction to Kerry.

"Kerry's greatest attraction is that he's not George Bush."