The revelation that Iran tried to leak Trump campaign materials to the Biden campaign has left little doubt who the Islamic Republic wants to see win — or, more to the point, lose — America’s looming presidential election.

But they aren’t the only foreign government picking sides.

Brazil’s president is “sympathetic” to Vice President Kamala Harris and European leaders have also signaled their preference for Ms. Harris. The German foreign ministry, for example, has been quite aggressive in deriding former President Donald Trump.

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Mr. Trump, meanwhile, has Hungarian President Viktor Orban firmly in his corner.

Then there’s Russian President Vladimir Putin who earlier this year suggested he preferred President Biden as more “predictable” than Mr. Trump. More recently he said, seemingly tongue-in-cheek, or perhaps foot-in-mouth, that he preferred Ms. Harris because of her “expressive and infectious laugh.”

Venturing into a foreign election is proclaimed to be gauche in elite global circles, but American politics often proves too enticing.

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“America is by far the world’s most powerful nation, and so many nations want to shape the outcome of presidential elections to their liking. There’s nothing new about that, but recent elections have seen far more brazen and aggressive efforts by international leaders to try to influence the outcome,” said Stephen Farnsworth, a political scientist at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia.

He said the lineup of nations behind each candidate right now shouldn’t be surprising.

“The basic pattern is what one would expect: the more liberal leaders would prefer Harris and the more conservative ones would prefer Trump,” he said.

Mr. Farnsworth said some foreign nations do more than share their preferences.

U.S. intelligence officials say Iran would like to take a shot at Mr. Trump, literally. They say it is retaliation for the 2020 drone slaying of Qassem Soleimani, who at the time ran Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s Quds Force.

This week American intelligence agencies revealed new details on Iran-backer hackers who stole Trump campaign emails. The hackers then sent some of the information, unsolicited, to news outlets and the Biden campaign, which has now become the Harris campaign.

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There is no indication the campaign recipients responded, U.S. officials said.

The House Judiciary Committee has opened an inquiry into Iran’s attempt to put its thumb on the balance of the election.

“Iran’s actions raise serious concerns about foreign election interference targeting President Trump’s campaign to support President Biden’s and Vice President Harris’s campaigns,” Chairman Jim Jordan, Ohio Republican, wrote in a letter asking the FBI for answers.

Mr. Biden, when he was the candidate, drew unabashed support from leaders such as Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Now that Ms. Harris is the Democratic Party’s nominee, the Brazilian is “sympathetic” to her, Bloomberg reported.

The current crop of Western European leaders was also generally politically aligned with Mr. Biden and, to the extent they know about her, Mr. Harris.

Newly minted British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, for example, reportedly briefed Mr. Harris’s campaign on how to win the election.

Ms. Harris is leaning into the foreign leaders, making it part of her campaign attack on Mr. Trump.

“I’m going to tell you that I have traveled the world as vice president of the United States. And world leaders are laughing at Donald Trump,” she said when she faced off against the former president in their only debate earlier this month.

That seemed to get under Mr. Trump’s skin.

He pointed to Mr. Orban, Hungary’s president, as countering evidence.

“Look, Viktor Orban said it. He said the most respected, most feared person is Donald Trump. We had no problems when Trump was president,” the former president said.

World leaders paid close attention to the debate, according to the BBC, which said the showdown drew attention from Moscow to Beijing to those involved in the Israel-Hamas conflict.

Mr. Putin’s team was particularly miffed that his name came up repeatedly, including a jab by Ms. Harris who told Mr. Trump the Russian leader would “eat you for lunch.”

“We don’t like this and hope they will keep our president’s name out of this,” a spokesman told the BBC.

Iran’s hack has drawn universal condemnation.

The Biden administration has also scolded Hungary for Mr. Orban’s deep involvement in the race, with the U.S. ambassador delivering a rebuke in a speech this month.

In citing foreign leaders’ disdain for Mr. Trump, Ms. Harris is following a path blazed by then-Sen. John Kerry in 2004, when he was the Democrats’ candidate trying to unseat President George W. Bush.

Mr. Kerry said he’d “met foreign leaders who can’t go out and say this publicly, but boy they look at you and say, ’You’ve got to win this, you’ve got to beat this guy, we need a new policy.’ Things like that.”

That claim backfired on Mr. Kerry, who refused to say which leaders were privately badmouthing the sitting U.S. president. Indeed, a review of Mr. Kerry’s schedules raised questions about whether he’d even had such meetings during the campaign.

Still, it’s no surprise that foreign leaders have thoughts about U.S. elections.

When Mr. Biden dropped out of the race in July, Bloomberg reported that the decision largely was greeted pragmatically by foreign leaders, many of whom saw the decision as a move that would help prevent Mr. Trump’s return to the White House.

“Only the ‘bad guys’ want to see Trump win,” Bloomberg reported, citing one Eastern European official.