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Mandela voted 'greatest' on world stage
LONDON, England (CNN) -- Leadership is seen by many in Britain and Germany as the quality which best defines being great, according to a new survey. The poll was conducted for CNN by TNS to mark the launch this weekend of CNN's new feature show "Quest." The show examines the concept of greatness and includes interviews with the Dalai Lama, Bill Clinton and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Nelson Mandela is considered by Britons to be the person who most embodies the quality of being great on the world stage in recent times (39 percent), and also comes top in the combined findings across Britain, France and Germany (35 percent of all respondents.) Mother Teresa comes second in the combined findings with 30 percent, Pope John Paul II third with 27 percent and Bob Geldof with five percent. Among respondents in Britain, just under one in five (19 percent) think that humility is the most important quality which defines greatness, with spirituality and charisma each receiving just eight percent of respondents' votes. Some 39 percent of respondents in Britain voted for Mandela as the embodiment of greatness, compared with 25 per cent for Mother Teresa, 17 percent for Pope John Paul II and 14 percent for Bob Geldof. In identical TNS polls for CNN in France and Germany, there were clear differences in the perception of greatness. A significant proportion of people in Britain (61 per cent) and Germany (46 per cent) see leadership as the quality which best defines being great. Among respondents in France, charisma was the defining quality of greatness (46 percent) followed by humility (30 percent.) In contrast, just 10 per cent of respondents opted for leadership and spirituality. However, charisma clearly emerged as an important quality with more than twice the proportion of respondents in Germany (19 percent) than in Britain (eight percent), opting for this. Compared with the clear preference among people in Britain for Nelson Mandela as the person who best embodied the quality of greatness, respondents in France and Germany were fairly evenly split in their voting between Mandela, Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II. Mandela just edged the lead in France (34 percent, of the vote compared with Mother Teresa on 31 percent and Pope John Paul II at 32 per cent), while in Germany Mother Teresa just edged out Mandela and Pope John Paul by a similarly small margin (33 per cent, versus 32 per cent for Mandela and 31 per cent for the former Pope.) While Bob Geldof took 14 percent of the vote in Britain, he polled respectively one percent and two percent in the French and German polls. Overall, the combined findings from respondents across the three European countries polled put leadership as the key quality defining greatness (40 percent), with humility just taking second place (26 percent) ahead of charisma at 24 per cent. Spirituality polled just 6 percent. "It's refreshing to see the diversity across Europe that this poll throws up, particularly so the confirmation of the high regard that Nelson Mandela is held in as a leading statesman of our time", commented Nick Wrenn, Managing Editor CNN International, Europe/Middle East/Africa. 
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