Merz hits rock bottom — who comes next?
One year in, 83% of Germans disapprove of Chancellor Merz — the worst rating in three decades. Berlin is already asking: who's next?
At a Glance
With 83% of Germans expressing dissatisfaction with his leadership, Chancellor Friedrich Merz holds the worst approval rating of any German leader in more than 30 years.
Germany’s economy remains stalled, battered by Chinese industrial competition, U.S. tariffs, and an unstable global environment that Merz badly misjudged during his campaign.
The governing coalition between Merz’s conservatives and the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) is showing serious cracks — raising real doubts about whether the government survives until 2029.
A chancellor caught in a vise
Friedrich Merz came to power with bold promises. Elected chancellor one year ago amid high expectations, he pledged a clean break: renewed economic growth, restored fiscal discipline — and no need for additional borrowing to get there. One year later, none of it has materialized. Germany’s economy remains at a standstill, squeezed by the rise of Chinese manufacturing, American import tariffs, and cascading global crises. Merz had significantly overestimated his ability to turn the tide through the sheer force of a supply-side agenda alone.
That gap — between the campaign narrative and the governing reality — could explain, at least in part, the depth of the public backlash. The number is stark: 83% of Germans say they are dissatisfied with their chancellor. It is the worst such figure recorded in Germany in over three decades.
A coalition fraying at the edges
The governing arrangement between Merz’s CDU/CSU conservative bloc and the Social Democrats (SPD) was always an awkward marriage of convenience. It is visibly fraying. The two coalition partners are clashing with increasing frequency over legislative priorities, making parliamentary business difficult and slow. Opposition lawmakers, including Max Lucks, a deputy from Germany’s Green party (die Grünen), describe a government without direction — one that lurches from crisis to crisis rather than building a strategic vision for the decades ahead.
That absence of direction registers in the electorate. Isabella, a 60-year-old Berliner who voted for Merz with genuine optimism, captures the mood of a disillusioned conservative base: prices are rising, businesses are closing, and the country’s infrastructure — bridges, roads, schools — continues to deteriorate. The vote of confidence has curdled into a sense of abandonment.
What the Merz case reveals about Germany
It would be reductive to blame the man alone. Germany’s structural situation is objectively difficult: an economic model built on industrial exports, cheap energy, and access to Chinese markets has been hit by successive shocks that no government could have reversed in twelve months.
But politics is also about framing. And that is where Merz may have done the most damage — not in the policies themselves, but in the expectations he set. Yann Wernert, a researcher at the Jacques Delors Centre Berlin, a Franco-German think tank focused on European policy, has argued that the chancellor overpromised on almost every front: growth, tax cuts, debt-free recovery. None of it was delivered. Wernert’s broader point — that political credibility is built on honest diagnosis as much as on performance — could suggest that Merz’s core mistake was electoral salesmanship, not just economic mismanagement.
For a reader in Boston or Toronto, the dynamic is familiar: the classic trap of overpromising a swift turnaround before facing a structural winter. The political cost of overpromising, when the morning never comes, tends to be paid in approval ratings.
The bottom line
Merz himself has publicly acknowledged he cannot say whether his government will survive until the end of its term in 2029. That is a remarkable admission for a sitting chancellor — and it opens a political space that both internal rivals and opposition parties have every reason to exploit.
The real question may no longer be how Merz recovers, but who benefits from his weakness, and on what timeline.
The answer will shape Germany’s next political chapter — and, by extension, the balance of power in Berlin that underpins a significant share of European governance.
Sources: franceinfo