The photo on the front page of the Sueddeutsche Zeitung sets the tone on Tuesday. It depicts an angry-looking, middle-aged man, both hands balled into fists extending outward from a face contorted with shouting. The man is in Kiev, Ukraine, and he is protesting against the apparently manipulated presidential run-off election results in Ukraine.

Ukrainians voted on Sunday, and as election results were tallied throughout the day on Monday, it became increasingly clear that something was afoot. At the end of the day, the state electoral commission declared victory for Viktor Yanukovych, the candidate handpicked by current president Leonid Kuchma to be his successor. The tally? 49.4 percent to 46.7 percent for opposition challenger Viktor Yushchenko. The only problem with the result is that independent exit polls conducted by a Kiev Institute and supported internationally came to a different conclusion. Its result: Yanukovych 43 percent -- Yushchenko 54 percent.

German newspapers on Tuesday join the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), who observed the elections, in roundly criticizing the results. The conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung locates its Ukraine editorial squarely on the front page and calls for Europe to address the matter of Ukraine's lack of democracy. The country, the paper argues, is too geopolitically important to ignore and it should matter to Europeans "whether the country makes progress on the way to democracy and market economy or whether it is 'freely' given up to Russia." The paper also points out -- with over 100,000 protestors taking to the streets of Prague on Monday (and 200,000 more on Tuesday) -- the potential for violence in the country is high.

The financial daily Handelsblatt likewise turns over its front-page editorial slot to the botched vote. It too addresses the fact that Russia was very clearly interested in the continuation of the status quo in Ukraine. Indeed, Putin made two separate appearances in Kiev to campaign for Yanukovych and Russian election observers were the only ones who announced that Sunday's vote was free and fair. The paper also notes that Europe has not done much to help Ukraine on the road to becoming economically and politically independent from Russia. "All too often in their history, Ukrainians have been ignored out of sensitivity for their large neighbor Russia. If that now happens again, the West shouldn't cry crocodile tears. It bears a clear responsibility -- because it always means Russia when it says Ukraine."

The Financial Times Deutschland, while also calling on Europe to help Ukraine and pointing out the importance for the EU to have a functioning democracy on its eastern border, additionally looks at the Ukrainian voters themselves and reminds readers what they were voting against. "Ukraine is a country in which people are imprisoned because they pass out fliers on the street. It is a country in which journalists are murdered and no investigation is made as to why. In Kuchma-Ukraine, workers must pay bribe money to get a job. The oligarchs who control the coal and steel industries in the east can buy parliamentary decisions at will.... The Ukrainian voters cannot be left alone."

German papers also looked a bit closer to home on Tuesday and commented on the just-released results of the second so-called "PISA study" -- a comparative look at public school education done by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). When the first study came out in 2001, Germany went into paroxysms of self-examination when they scored much, much lower than expected. Three years of education debates and reforms later, Germany once again finds itself quite a ways down the list ranking 21st out of 32 countries evaluated.

The left-leaning Sueddeutsche Zeitung takes the recent results in stride. It is too early, the paper writes, for the education reforms to have completely turned around Germany's results and the introduction of unified standards for pupils and opening the way for all-day schools will eventually show results. "It may sound like a paradox," it writes, "but poor results and effective reforms are by no means mutually exclusive."

The Handelsblatt isn't so sure and allows itself something of a rant about what it sees as the dissatisfactory education reforms in Germany. "Where is the drastic increase in the number of teachers, or can't we at least employ assistants to reduce the workload of our teachers as is common in (PISA winner) Finland? Where is the much-needed additional funding for kindergartens and elementary schools? Where are the required German courses for foreign elementary school pupils ...? Where are the continuing education courses for teachers hiding?" There is lots of work left to be done, the paper argues.