In 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama was welcomed in Berlin by an ecstatic crowd of 200,000 people eager to listen to the new “American messiah”, as the German magazine Der Spiegel dubbed him. Obama descended to the Continent just like John Kennedy, Europe’s quintessential United States political icon, who in 1963 delivered in Berlin one of his most inspiring and famous speeches.

The romance has not faded. If Obama spoke again today, he would find the same, adoring crowd — one more realistic about what a president can achieve, but no less enthusiastic. The same applies to most, if not all, major European capitals. The Obama hype is still here; the Obama nostalgia already heart-wrenching.

Since Obama took office, pundits have predicted that the idol would fall. In each minimum oscillation of Obama’s approval ratings, they eagerly detected tangible evidence that the inflated popularity of the early days would in the end decline.

Excessive expectations would generate monumental disappointments, we were told. Beatles-like “Obamania” was not tailored for nitty-gritty, daily political dealings. It was structurally incompatible with the tedious, day-to-day routine of our dysfunctional and discredited democracies. Obama’s greying hair and bony cheeks seemed to symbolise, along with the unfashionable BlackBerry he stubbornly clung to, the rapid withering of the Obama myth.

Instead, Europe’s Obama adoration proved extraordinarily resilient. It survived various adversities, multiple criticisms, “red lines” that were not so red after all and ensuing humanitarian catastrophes, for which Europe had to take the brunt.

It was not affected by policies and choices — many Europeans denounced and criticised the escalation of drone use and the failure of closing Guantánamo. And it returned with a vengeance in the past two years. According to a June poll by the Pew Research Centre, 80 per cent of Europeans expressed their confidence in Obama “doing the right thing in world affairs”.

In eight years, this key indicator has never dropped below 70 per cent. In the same poll, Hillary Clinton received 59 per cent; Trump 9 per cent — a resounding 85 per cent said they have “no confidence” in the President-elect. When Ronald Reagan left office, he was most popular in West Germany — 53 per cent of people there rated him favourably. His approval rating was less than 50 per cent in all other major European countries.

No European leader comes even close. The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, gets a respectable 50 per cent, although her popularity at home has been constantly dipping. Abysmal approval ratings finally convinced François Hollande not to run for a second term, the first time since 1958 that a sitting president did not seek reelection in France. Even the flamboyant and social media-obsessed former Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi has seen his once unique star decline, finally resigning after a crashing defeat over a poorly conceived constitutional reform.

How can we explain Europe’s love affair with America’s self-proclaimed “first Pacific President”?

Four answers come to mind. The first is connected to the kind of foreign policy discourse that Obama has consistently deployed over the years: humble, inclusive, restrained and post-imperial. In his eight years in office, Obama has shown a clear reluctance to over-rely on military power. The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg noted that Obama scorned “the playbook that comes out of the foreign-policy establishment”, a playbook obsessed with credibility that tends to prescribe “militarised responses”.

This kind of discourse is positively “un-American”, at least in the militaristic, arrogant and interventionist stereotype that many Europeans still have of the United States and its foreign policy. Under Obama, the US has seen its image polished if not transformed: to many European observers, the President has been truly exceptional in his “de-exceptionalisation” of the US. The comparison with his predecessor, George W. Bush, who once said “we want to be a nation that serves goals larger than self”, is telling: in Europe, approval ratings of the American President jumped from 19 per cent to 77 per cent between 2008 and 2009.

Second: distance. We have not had to endure the daily, frustrating experience of watching Obama’s poetry meet the prose of governing. Political mythology thrives on physical separation and occasional engagement. To many foreign observers, Obama is the charismatic and learned leader who delivers sophisticated and rousing speeches from the executive pulpit, not the harassed and constitutionally weak president who has to deal and compromise with Mitch McConnell or Paul D. Ryan. The inner tension between Obama’s words and actions — the sublime erudition of the former and the earthly reality of the latter — has been way less visible from this side of the High Sea. Eight years later, we are still very much at the “Yes We Can” stage — the “Is Féidir Linn”, as the Celt and occasional polyglot Obama explained to an ecstatic crowd in Dublin a few years back. The “folks, that’s the most I can do” rarely made it to the Old Continent and when it did, we proved very understanding.

Third: the alternatives — namely, what Obama is not. In 2008, “anything but Bush” was the global motto, uniting not only Europeans but the entire world. It is “anything but Trump” today, with most Europeans still in a state of shock and stupor for the election of someone whom — the same Pew poll told us — very few of them consider up to the task.

“Do you have confidence in Trump doing the right thing in world affairs?” the poll asked. Germans responded no 89-6, French 85-9 and the British 85-12. The Italians, more attuned to foul-mouthed, improbable and perpetually bronzed leaders, were a more modest 59-21.

Fourth and last: escapism. That is what myths are for, in the end. “Travel books”, the Italian novelist Antonio Tabucchi once wrote, “have the virtue of bringing an elsewhere, at once theoretical and plausible, to our inescapable, unyielding here”.

Global icons produce the same elating effect. They give us an elsewhere. And when the unyielding here of your life has been Silvio Berlusconi or François Hollande, that elsewhere appears all the more shiny and desirable.

•Mario Del Pero is a professor of international history at SciencesPo, Paris. His book on the Obama presidency is out in February