If all goes to plan, Friedrich Merz will become the Federal Republic's 10th chancellor on May 6. The two remaining hurdles appear to be formalities: On Monday, his conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) will convene for a special party conference to approve the coalition contract with the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD). Then, a few days later, the SPD's members — some grumbling notwithstanding — are expected to approve the alliance in a vote, with the results announced on April 30.

But Merz won't have long to enjoy the congratulations. Even though he won the national election in late February, the 69-year-old's personal popularity seems to be on a permanent slide: According to an April poll by research institute Forsa for Stern magazine, just 21% of respondents consider Merz trustworthy — nine percentage points lower than in August, and down three points from January.

The same poll found that only 40% of respondents consider the incoming chancellor a strong leader, and 27% think Merz "knows what moves people," both of which represent nine-point falls since January. On the plus side — indeed, the only leadership criteria in which Merz scored a majority in the survey — about 60% of respondents believe that Merz "speaks understandably."

A not-so-grand coalition

It's no shock that Merz isn't exactly the most popular chancellor-in-waiting Germany has ever seen. But Ursula Münch, the director of the Tutzing Academy for Political Education in Bavaria, told DW that it's not all his fault. "The circumstances are very different than they used to be," Münch said. "We have a government that has a relatively small proportion of support among voters."

Merz has not picked the most fortunate moment in history: In traditional political parlance, a coalition of the CDU/CSU and SPD is called a "grand coalition," because for many decades these two parties represented an overwhelming majority of Germany's voters (sometimes well over 80%). In the fragmented landscape of 2025, in which parties have splintered and splintered again over the past 20 years, the two big centrist parties can only claim to represent 45% of voters, going by the February election results.

Merz's trust issues

There are two obvious reasons why the perception of Merz's trustworthiness might have fallen in the past few months. In January, Merz broke his own word 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), whole factions of which are deemed by intelligence agencies to be a threat to Germany's democratic order.

For CDU supporters, however, that seemed like a less-egregious U-turn than the one Merz performed a few weeks later: In March, the party leader agreed a debt brake reform with the SPD and the Greens that paved the way for €1 trillion ($1.14 trillion) in new loans, something he had expressly ruled out throughout the election campaign.

Unsurprisingly, many of his voters felt betrayed. In a "Politbarometer" poll carried out by public broadcaster ZDF at the time, some 73% of Germans agreed that he had deceived voters — including some 44% of CDU/CSU supporters.

Merz's head-through-the-wall attitude

Merz has problems that go much further back than his recent U-turns. Surveys have shown that he is particularly unpopular among women. A Forsa survey from March 2024 found that only 9% of women aged 18 to 29 saw Merz as their preferred chancellor candidate.

The incoming chancellor has been dogged with accusations of misogyny. In 1997, as is often brought up, he was one of the Bundestag members who voted against recognizing rape within marriage as a crime. In October last year, he was criticized for rejecting the idea of gender-balanced Cabinets, and this reputation was not helped by a photo released in February showing that the main negotiators of the CDU/CSU bloc were all middle-aged men.

Merz is also unpopular in eastern Germany, where he regularly polled behind both the AfD's Alice Weidel and the SPD's Olaf Scholz in the run-up to the election — partly, it seems, because of his belligerent attitude toward Russia.

Merz's AfD problem

Merz's calculation appears to be that, with right-wing populism apparently on rise around the world, what people want is straight-talking leadership. But populism does not appear to be making him more popular. In November 2018, when he first announced his candidacy to re-take the leadership of the CDU, Merz posted a tweet that seems to age worse with every month: "We can once again reach up to 40% and halve the AfD. That is possible!" he wrote. "But we must create the preconditions for it. That is our task."

Almost the opposite has happened. Since Merz eventually re-took the CDU leadership in January 2022 (on his third attempt), the party's poll ratings have stayed at 24%, while the AfD's have not halved but doubled: From 11% to 24%. Germany's far-right and center-right parties are now neck and neck.

But, of course, Merz has not had a chance to be chancellor yet, and Münch said he might yet be able to make good on his AfD prediction — if his government runs without the internal strife that dogged Scholz's coalition, and if it is not hit by an external crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic or escalating war in Ukraine that would requires the chancellor to take more U-turns and lose even more trust. Those are big ifs.

"The best way to keep the AfD small isn't making some random announcement about big changes in refugee policy that you can't implement," Münch said. "It's concrete measures that people also notice. But that's not something that a new government can just turn around overnight. People need to be given confidence again, and that will only be possible when the economic forecast turns more positive and the refugee numbers fall."

Merz was initially considered a strong candidate precisely because of his business background (he was on the board at the investment company BlackRock for several years), which was supposed to signal his economic acumen. In the past few years, however, his populist statements have increasingly been about immigration, and that hasn't helped him shake off the AfD.

Edited by: Rina Goldenberg

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