The Brandenburg Gate during a rehearsal before festival of lights in Berlin, October 11, 2011. (Tobias Schwarz/Courtesy Reuters)

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Welcome to the first installment of our weekly series, Views from Abroad, which will feature foreign voices discussing the U.S. presidential campaign. CFR Consulting Editor Bernard Gwertzman kicks off our series with an interview on CFR.org with Josef Joffe, publisher of  the German weekly Die Zeit, who says despite their ongoing economic troubles, Europeans are closely following the U.S. presidential campaign. Excerpt below:

Is the political campaigning in the United States attracting much attention in Europe, and in Germany in particular?

Of course it is, just like it was four years ago, though at that point the lineup was a great deal more dramatic: there was a woman [Hillary Clinton], there was a black or half-black [Barack Obama], competing vigorously for the Democratic Party nomination. That added a bit of extra spice to the process.

But it’s really no less attention-grabbing this year, and I have a simple explanation for that. It just goes to show once more that whatever the talk is about the decline of America and it receding from the world stage, the fact is, and this attention proves it, that the United States is and continues to be the number one power. What other electoral process or primary process do we pay more attention to? I only have a vague sense of what is happening in France right now. I just know the two main contenders [Francois Hollande, Socialist Party, and President Nicolas Sarkozy] and I know even less of what’s going on in other Western countries. So in the global imagination, the United States remains number one, and therefore we know such strange sets of names as [Mitt] Romney, [Rick] Santorum, [Jon] Huntsman, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, and Rick Perry. We’ve been following them very closely.

What has been the public reaction to President Obama since his taking office in January 2009?

When Obama appeared on the scene in the summer of 2008, especially when he came to Berlin, drawing a crowd of about 200,000, which is as much as the Rolling Stones would have pulled, he appeared to the Europeans and to the Germans in particular as a mix of rock star and redeemer against the foil of George W. Bush, who was universally disliked in Europe and in particular in Germany. Obama did to the rest of the world what he did to the American imagination: He was a surface onto which Americans and Europeans could project their fondest dreams about the new America.

Has that changed?

We are not that far apart from each other across the Atlantic. Whenever you invest your hopes and projections into a human being, especially a political human being, you are bound to be disappointed. The disappointment probably is stronger in the United States, but it is strong here too. After all, he is not a redeemer, but the president of the superpower who, once he got down to the sordid business of politics, was going to lose his luster and shine. That’s a natural process in the affairs of men.

Click here for the full interview