The incredible shrinking German chancellor

Friedrich Merz wanted to lead Europe. First he has to lead his country.

By MARC FELIX SERRAO
in Berlin

^{Illustration by Natália Delgado/ POLITICO}

When Friedrich Merz arrived at the White House last summer for his first meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump, the German chancellor brought a gift calibrated to flatter without groveling: a framed copy of the birth certificate of the American leader’s grandfather, Friedrich Trump, born in 1869 in Kallstadt, a wine-growing village in southwestern Germany.

The meeting went smoothly enough. The two men talked Ukraine, trade, defense spending and the fraying transatlantic order. Trump, pleased, called Merz a “very respected man.” That was then.

Trump now speaks about Merz very differently. Last week, the president said the chancellor “doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” and added: “No wonder Germany is doing so poorly, both economically, and otherwise!”

Merz, 70, had walked into this fight himself. Speaking to students at a high school, the chancellor had accused the U.S. of attacking Iran without a strategy or exit plan. “An entire nation is being humiliated by the Iranian leadership,” he said.

Since then, the bilateral mood has cooled sharply. Washington has announced plans to withdraw thousands of U.S. troops from Germany. And the planned stationing of Tomahawk cruise missiles on German soil, once presented as part of a new way to deter Russia, now looks far less certain.

Berlin is trying to play down the damage, insisting the troop reduction had long been under review and that no final decision has been made on the missiles. But whatever the precise chain of cause and effect, the damage is real — and it happened under a leader who has taken pride in being seen as what the Germans call an Außenkanzler, a chancellor whose authority rests heavily on command of foreign affairs. 

The timing is unfortunate. On Wednesday, Merz marks his first year in office. Until recently, foreign policy was the one field in which even many of his critics thought he had found his footing. Abroad, he seemed more assured than his predecessor Olaf Scholz and more willing than former Chancellor Angela Merkel to speak the language of power: more serious on defense, clearer on Russia, more comfortable with the idea that Germany may no longer be able to avoid a role it has long resisted — leading. 

At home, Merz has always looked far weaker. He is constrained by his coalition with the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) and weighed down by the impression that he gives ground too quickly when the partnership comes under strain. For most of his first year as chancellor, one thing seemed to define him: the gap between external ambition and domestic weakness. The clash with Trump now threatens to eliminate that distinction, just not in the way Merz might have hoped.

In a poll published in late April, just 15 percent of Germans said they were satisfied with his performance, while 83 percent were dissatisfied — the worst rating ever recorded for a German chancellor. Even Scholz, at the tail end of his government, was more popular than Merz is now.

For this report, I spoke with current and former advisers to the chancellor, former federal ministers who served under Merkel and Scholz, senior members of Merz’s Christian Democratic Union, as well as the center-right party’s supporters in its youth organization and its pro-business wing. Most spoke only on condition of anonymity, a measure of how sensitive judgments about Merz’s first year in office have already become.

Two questions stand at the center: How did a man who took office promising authority and renewal come to seem so diminished so quickly? And can he recover?

The loner in power

Merz won Germany’s 2025 election because he promised a fresh start. He cast himself as Merkel’s opposite: willing to end the long, soft drift of the previous decades and deliver a genuine conservative, pro-market change of course.

His biography suited that promise. When I first interviewed Merz in May 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic shifted almost every conversation on to a screen, his political career looked long over. Eighteen years earlier, Merkel had ousted and sidelined him as leader of their party’s parliamentary group. What followed was a lucrative second act in business: years on supervisory boards and advisory councils, far from the daily trench warfare of politics.

Merz was a man with money but without power: vice president of the CDU Economic Council, a party-aligned business lobby, yet politically peripheral, with no government office, party post or parliamentary seat. A private citizen, in other words, who could have glided very comfortably into retirement. But Merz had unfinished business.

Before we could begin our on-screen interview, he fought with the technology in his Berlin apartment. I could hear him, but he could hear nothing. Merz grew irritated, then furious. After a few seconds, he began to shout. What exactly he shouted never became part of the authorized interview and cannot be quoted here. Suffice it to say: The man can curse.

His closest aide at the time, a young man named Armin Peter, fixed the problem; Merz had not turned on his speakers. It was a small scene, but in retrospect, it feels oddly revealing. Today, as chancellor, he commands a vast apparatus. Back then, he had only Peter and a few loyal helpers from the hilly Sauerland region, the rural, conservative corner of Western Germany that shaped him politically.

There are politicians who reward and return loyalty. Merkel is one of them; she has kept the same office manager and close adviser for more than three decades. Merz is different. He expects loyalty, one former confidant told me, but does not return it.

None of the people who accompanied Merz on his long march to power has remained in his immediate orbit. A key former personal aide and confidante left the chancellery after just 11 weeks. His former chief of staff was pushed out in January. Peter, the young man who helped him with the speakers, was demoted from personal spokesperson to deputy party spokesperson. He now works for a business forum.

The result, according to someone who was once close to Merz, is a government apparatus full of advisers but no real allies. He has no inner circle bound to him beyond the office, no loyalists fighting together for the policy changes he promised. Merz, this person said, has immense self-confidence but is also strikingly susceptible to influence.

Domestic hobbles

At home, the picture has been grim from the start.

Merz took office last year after an election that saw his center-right Christian Democrats win, but with one of the worst results in the party’s history — and the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) not far behind in second place. After negotiating a coalition agreement with the Social Democrats, Merz at first fell short of being chosen chancellor, becoming the first leader in Germany’s postwar history to have to go back to parliament for a second vote. 

He’s had to scale back his ambitions accordingly. Immediately after the election, however, he and his coalition partners pressured the outgoing Bundestag to amend the constitution to allow record borrowing for spending on defense, infrastructure and the fight against climate change. The hope was to lay the groundwork for a turning point in the country’s trajectory. Instead, the perception is that — aside from promises on military spending — Germany’s course has remained largely unchanged.

A promised cut in household energy taxes never materialized, nor did Merz’s loudly announced “autumn of reforms.” Although he once called tax increases “poison,” high earners are now bracing for more of them. On migration, the government can point to lower asylum numbers, but deportations remain limited. And the larger economic ailments persist: high energy prices, heavy taxes and levies, a runaway bureaucracy and deindustrialization, which is no longer something on the horizon but a growing reality.

In fact, rather than being seen as a break from the past, Merz has begun to remind many Germans of Merkel. But a former CDU federal minister, who also spoke to me on condition of anonymity, argued that the comparison is unfair in one crucial respect: Merkel would never have allowed herself to be boxed in by a coalition partner.

As an example, he pointed to a recent relief package: a temporary cut in fuel taxes and a tax-free bonus of up to €1,000 for employees. Merz had expressed doubts about that kind of response to rising energy prices right until the coalition’s final negotiating session. Then he signed off on it. Merkel, the former minister said, would never have entered talks from such a position. And she would never have let her partners make her look weak.

Christian Lindner, Germany’s former finance minister, put it more acidly. “Friedrich Merz won his chancellorship with positions and promises that stand in contradiction to the positions and actions that now define his chancellorship,” he told me. “It remains an open question how this break, unprecedented in its scope, will affect our country’s political culture.”

Lindner, 47, was the leader of the Free Democrats, but his parliamentary career ended when the FDP crashed out of the Bundestag in the last election. He has since left politics and joined the executive board of Autoland, Germany’s largest independent car dealership.

And yet, Lindner is not alone in seeing a widening gap between Merz’s promises and his record. Andreas Rödder, one of Germany’s best-known conservative intellectuals, makes much the same point. For a time, the historian seemed set to become one of the chancellor’s principal idea men. After Merz took over the CDU, he put Rödder in charge of a commission on the party’s “values and foundations.”

But when Rödder began to cast cautious doubt on the CDU’s rigid firewall against cooperation with the AfD, he came under attack from inside the party — and Merz declined to stand by him. The chancellor’s central problem, Rödder told me, is the gap between announcement and implementation.

International ambitions

In the earlier months of his chancellorship, foreign policy offered a rare bright spot for a leader so often besieged at home. Even Merz-skeptics thought he got the tone right. He sounded more forceful than Scholz or Merkel, especially on Russia’s imperial aggression and on Europe’s duty to defend both Ukraine and itself.

Merz wants Germany to remain anchored in the transatlantic alliance, but he also wants Europe to become less dependent on American power, calling for “a strong, self-sustaining European pillar within the alliance.” At the same time, he has never warmed to Trump’s MAGA movement. His instinct was to deal pragmatically, and with as much diplomatic restraint as possible.

The chancellor’s recent Iran remark broke that rule. It was not candor in the national interest, nor an unavoidable act of principle, but a gratuitous swipe at a president whose vanity and vindictiveness are well known. The episode may be the most consequential example of needless rhetorical sharpness. But it was not the first time Merz had let that side of himself show when dealing with other leaders.

In March, the chancellor stepped up to a podium in the European Council building in Brussels. It was late at night after a long meeting of the EU’s national leaders, and the 6-foot-6-inch-tall chancellor stooped as he leaned forward to speak into the microphone. “Well, ladies and gentlemen, good evening or good morning, whichever you prefer,” he said. “I’m glad you held out. We had to do the same.” Then the geniality disappeared.

Merz turned on Viktor Orbán, the nationalist Hungarian prime minister who had blocked an aid package for Ukraine. Orbán’s veto, Merz said, was “an act of gross disloyalty in the European Union” that would leave “deep scars.” The chancellor was not alone in his anger toward the Hungarian leader, but the directness of his assault stood out. The timing made his attack even sharper. Orbán, a Trump ally, was headed into a difficult campaign for an election he would ultimately lose.

Are Merz’s outbursts simply a matter of clumsy communication and an occasionally loose tongue? In Germany, he has a reputation for both. Or is the strain of his troubled coalition at home beginning to spill over into his conduct abroad? A chancellor weakened domestically may be tempted to sound stronger internationally. The danger is that, in doing so, he harms the German interests he means to defend.

Coalition troubles

One reason for Merz’s troubles is coalition arithmetic. The chancellor has tied himself to the political center, emphatically, almost morally, rejecting any suggestion of cooperation with the far right. “I have made a final decision to seek support for our policies exclusively in the center,” he said at a CDU party conference in Stuttgart in February. “At the moment, that narrows us down to a coalition with the SPD.” The line was meant as a declaration of democratic hygiene. It also amounted to ceding power to Lars Klingbeil, the vice chancellor, finance minister and co-leader of the Social Democrats.

Klingbeil clearly understands how to handle Merz. Twenty-two years younger than the chancellor, he has often looked like the sharper tactician. Again and again, Klingbeil has played the role of the pragmatist who would like to go further but simply cannot sell certain policies to his comrades in the party.

Senior politicians from Merz’s CDU have often only learned later what had already been agreed between the two men. When Katherina Reiche, Germany’s economy minister, recently criticized Klingbeil’s flirtation with a tax on oil-company “windfall profits,” she was reprimanded by the chancellery. Only after CDU resistance stiffened did Merz join in the defense of his minister. 

The Social Democrats are not the chancellor’s only problem either. In addition lacking a loyal inner circle, Merz and his party lack a network of like-minded publishers and intellectuals to arm politicians with arguments, something his opponents on the left and the nationalist right enjoy. This is partly because Christian Democrats have seen themselves not as an ideological force but as a broad catch-all movement. The result is a recurring pattern: The chancellor tries to speak plainly, but without enough argumentative precision, he often leaves himself open to attack.

In the fall, for example, Merz spoke of a “problem” in the “cityscape” and connected that impression to deportations. The formulation was so vague it left ample room for hostile interpretation. Critics accused him of stigmatizing migrants, and even parts of his own coalition and party distanced themselves. Merz later tried to clarify what he had meant. But the damage was done.

That same pattern runs through his domestic record. Leading economists warned early that Merz’s debt-financed launch would prove a mere flash in the pan unless it was followed by serious reform. That warning now looks prescient.

Merz now enters his second year with three conceivable paths before him: On the first, the coalition holds and the reforms, like the coalition agreement itself, bear an unmistakable SPD imprint. Germany gains stability, at least until the next federal election, but not the change of course the chancellor promised.

On the second path, strong showings by the AfD in Eastern Germany’s fall elections — where the far right could even clinch its first state premiership — deepen the coalition’s centrifugal forces. Merz has repeatedly ruled out a minority government and shifting majorities, including with the far right. But politics is full of impossibilities, up until the moment they happen. If Merz remains unwilling, another figure in his party may prove less inhibited, pushing the CDU toward tolerating shifting majorities, even with the AfD. And who knows, at some point, perhaps even toward a coalition, though such a step would very likely tear the party apart. 

On the third path, an external shock — another war, terrorism, a pandemic, a financial crash — blows apart the assumptions on which this coalition rests and forces a sharper reckoning.

It is still too early for a final verdict on Merz. On that point, everyone I spoke to agreed, including those who had little positive to say about his first year. History can move slowly. Germany’s postwar leaders Helmut Kohl and Gerhard Schröder both needed time before their defining domestic projects emerged. But they led mass parties with vote shares near 40 or even 50 percent. Under Merz, the Christian Democrats have been able to muster only about half that. Meanwhile, the AfD, which Merz once pledged to weaken, has surpassed his party in the polls.

Merz’s problem is no longer merely that his domestic record falls short of his campaign promises. It is that the one area in which he seemed to rise above that weakness — foreign policy — now reflects a similar flaw: a tendency to speak forcefully before calculating the consequences.

If the German chancellor is to recover, he’ll likely have to flip his playbook. He’ll need to establish authority at home and show more restraint abroad.