Friedrich Merz likely take over as the Federal Republic’s 10th president on May 6 if everything goes according to plan. His conservative Christian Democratic Union ( CDU) will convene on Monday for a special party conference to approve the coalition agreement with the center-left Social Democratic Party ( SPD). The SPD’s people are expected to approve the empire in a ballot a few days later, despite some grumbling, with the results set to be released on April 30.
However, Merz won’t have to wait to love the gratitude. Even though he won the popular vote in the late February, Merz’s personal popularity appears to be declining steadily: Just 21 % of respondents to an April poll by Forsa for Stern magazine say they believe him to be trustworthy, down three points from January and nine percentage points from August.
Only 40 % of respondents in the same poll think the incoming chancellor is a strong leader, and 27 % believe Merz “knows what moves people,” which represents nine-point declines since January. On the plus side, about 60 % of respondents believe that Merz” speaks rightly” despite the fact that this is the only authority factor that Merz scored a lot in the study.
A not-so-great partnership
Merz isn’t simply the most well-known chancellor-in-waiting German has ever seen, so it’s no impact. However, Ursula Münch, the Tutzing Academy for Political Education in Bavaria, asserted to DW that it is not entirely his fault. According to Münch,” the conditions are quite different than they used to be.” ” Our federal enjoys a relatively small degree of voter help.”
A coalition of the CDU/CSU and SPD is known as a “grand coalition,” in traditional political terminology, because for many decades these two parties have dominated the German electorate ( sometime well over 80 % ). The two major centrist parties can simply claim to represent 45 % of citizens in the scattered panorama of 2025, in which events have splintered and splintered again over the past 20 years, according to the February poll results.
Merz’s issues with respect
There are two glaring causes of a decline in integrity for Merz over the past several decades. Merz broke his own word in January when he became the first CDU leader to pass a motion through the Bundestag with the support of the far-right Alternative for Germany ( AfD ), where entire factions are viewed by intelligence agencies as a threat to Germany’s democratic order.
However, it appeared to be a less egregious U-turn for CDU supporters than Merz’s agreement to a debt-breed reform that paved the way for €1 trillion ($ 1.14 trillion ) in new loans, something he had expressly ruled out throughout the campaign.
Understandably, many of his supporters felt betrayed. Around 73 % of Germans agreed that he had deceived voters in a” Politbarometer” poll conducted by public broadcaster ZDF at the time, including some 44 % of CDU/CSU supporters.
Merz’s perspective is incredibly offensive.
Merz’s issues go up a long way beyond his most recent U-turns. According to studies, he is specially unpopular with people. Only 9 % of women aged 18 to 29 thought of Merz as their preferred chancellor candidate, according to a Forsa survey from March 2024.
The approaching chancellor has been plagued by hatred accusations. He was one of the Bundestag people in 1997 who voted against making murder in marriage a crime, as is frequently reported. He was criticized for rejecting the concept of gender-balanced Cabinets in October of last year, and a picture that was released in February that revealed that the primary negotiators of the CDU/CSU union were all middle-aged men did not help this status.
Merz is even controversial in eastern Germany, where he frequently placed third behind both the AfD’s Alice Weidel and the SPD’s Olaf Scholz in the run-up to the poll, which appears to be partially due to his hostile attitude toward Russia.
Merz’s AfD issue
Merz’s conclusion appears to be that what people want is straight-talking leadership given that right-wing populism is evidently increasing all over the world. However, democracy does not appear to increase his popularity. Merz announced his candidacy to retake the CDU authority in November 2018 with the following tweet that seems to get older with each fortnight:” We can once again reach up to 40 % and reduce the AfD. That is a possibility,” he wrote. However, we may make the prerequisites. That is the task of us.
The exact same has occurred. Since Merz eventually retakes the CDU leadership in January 2022 ( on his third attempt ), the party’s poll ratings have remained at 24 %, while the AfD’s have increased from 11 % to 24 %. Germany’s far-right and center-right functions are currently at odds with one another.
But, of course, Merz hasn’t had a chance to become president however, and Münch said he might still be able to fulfill his AfD forecast if his government operates without the inner strife that plagued Scholz’s coalition and if an additional crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic or an escalating war in Ukraine would require the chancellor to produce more U-turns and lose even more trust. Great uncertainties, those are.
The best way to preserve the AfD little isn’t making some arbitrary announcements about significant changes in refugee coverage that you can’t put into practice, Münch said. It’s” concrete steps that people even notice,” the author says. However, a new federal cannot completely change that. Individuals need to be given new confidence, and that only does happen when the refugee population declines and the financial outlook improves.
Merz’s financial acumen, which he had previously served on the board of the funding organization BlackRock for several years, was intended to indicate his powerful standing as a candidate. However, his nationalist remarks have grown to include immigration in recent years, which hasn’t helped him get rid of the AfD.
