Not only the French. Much of the fervid absorption in the primaries and caucuses  accessible as never before on 24-hour satellite and cable television channels like CNN and Fox News  seems inspired by a hope that the American electoral process will end an era of foreign policy dominance by neoconservatives.

“There is a desperate sense of need that there must be something better than Bush out there,” said Dean Godson, head of a conservative research group in London called Policy Exchange. Or, as Thomas Valasek, a spokesman for the Center for European Reform in London, put it: “The world at large has a massive stake in the outcome of the elections. Never before has the U.S. had such a terrible reputation, a terrible image.”

It is, perhaps, too early to guess what specific changes Europeans and other non-Americans expect from a new government. Many of America’s Asian trading partners worry about what they see as Democratic proclivities toward economic protectionism and stricter targets on greenhouse gas emissions.

But there are broader concerns. As Ramesh Thakur, a political science professor in India, wrote: “We foreigners can but pray that the new president, whoever he or she may be, will return America to its strengths, values and the tradition of exporting hope and other optimism. And so help to lift America and the world up, not tear one another down.”

In Japan, too, there are hopes for American renewal. “Already the fixed idea, ‘Only a white man can become president,’ has been broken,” the newspaper Mainichi Shimbun said Jan. 15. “We are witnessing the history, the process of grass-roots democracy turning into the U.S. strength.”

Israelis, for their part, seem to look at the elections through the narrower prism of their own security, and many seem to have concluded that Mrs. Clinton would be the best American president for Israel  a calculation bolstered by familiarity with her husband. By contrast, said Oz Katz, 29, an Israeli graduate student in public policy, Mr. Obama “is not really known to us.”

There is deep interest in the campaign in the West African nation of Senegal, fueled in large part by a dislike of President Bush and a hope that a new president will be more open to immigration and less hostile to Islam.