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Having lived in Germany for twenty-odd years (off and on), it’s a fairly humorous article. Messina shows up and thinks he has ‘magic’ to change a German manufactured election system? This is like Timothy Geithner showing up and saying he wants the Germans to shift to the US model of economics for success (Germans just laugh about Timothy’s strategy). The same is true for Bill Gates coming in and telling Germans how to run their university system (they laughed over his advice too). They even gave Hillary Clinton a long-standing platform to talk about world affairs, and now the Germans mostly admit she has a very limited knowledge of whatever she was talking about.

It’s reached a point in the last five years in Germany where they are skeptical of just about any American who arrives and wants a ‘piece of the action’. Messina will get some invitations to parties....sip some wine with SPD members...and get some minor attention. Other than that....he’s a non-player, and will be regarded as such.

I should add...right now, the SPD is in the lowest position of the past forty years. The biggest reason is that Chancellor Merkel has adapted to the top dozen causes of the old SPD....she’s anti-nuke-power and pro-immigration. The CDU is marginally different from the SPD today.

If you were going to pick a major topic to hurt all of the top six political parties in Germany....it’s refugees and immigration. All of the six stand for an open-door policy and I would take a guess that somewhere between twenty-five to forty percent of the public is very much anti-refugee/immigrant. If any party (even a minor party) came out and was totally anti-refugee...they’d all side with that party and the next election (fall of 2017) would really shift over.

Messina just wants some SPD idiots to sign a check or two and he’d do an Americanization of some political folks and hype up their chances. German politics doesn’t work that way. The party apparatus works totally different in Germany and I doubt if he grasps that angle.