If all goes according to plan, Friedrich Merz will become Germany's tenth chancellor on May 6. Despite winning the election in late February, the 69-year-old CDU leader's approval rating has been steadily declining. According to a public opinion poll conducted by the Forsa Institute in April, . This is nine points lower than last August and three points lower than in January.
According to the same sociological survey, only 40 percent of people believe that the future chancellor is a strong leader, and the percentage of respondents who say that Merz knows "what excites people" is only 27. About 60 percent of Germans believe that the future chancellor of the country "speaks clearly" - the only criterion by which the majority approves of Merz.
Not so grand coalition
According to Ursula Münch, director of the Tutzing Academy of Political Science in Bavaria, Merz's unpopularity is not entirely his fault. "The circumstances are very different. Our government now enjoys the support of a relatively small proportion of voters," she explains.
This is not the best moment for Merz. Traditionally, coalitions between the CDU/CSU and the SPD are called "grand coalitions" because for a long time the two parties represented the majority of Germans, sometimes even over 80 percent. In 2025 However, the political landscape is more fragmented, with the two major centrist parties representing just 45 percent of voters.
Merz's trust issues
There are two obvious reasons why Merz's trust has eroded in recent months. In January, the CDU leader broke his own word when his proposal was passed in the Bundestag by the votes of the "Alternative for Germany" (AfD).
For CDU supporters, however, this seemed a less scary turn of events than the one Merz made a few weeks later. In March, the party leader negotiated a debt brake reform with the SPD and the Greens that paved the way for new borrowing of 1 trillion euros - something he had explicitly ruled out during the election campaign. Not surprisingly, many of his voters felt betrayed. A survey conducted by ZDF showed that 73% of Germans believe that Merz has lied to the voters. This opinion is also shared by 44% of CDU/CSU supporters.
Problems with women
However, Friedrich Merz also has problems that date back long before his recent political turns. According to surveys, he is particularly unpopular with women. A public opinion survey from March 2024 showed that only nine percent of women between the ages of 18 and 29 would like Merz to be chancellor.
The future chancellor has been accused of misogyny. As is often recalled, he was one of the members of the Bundestag who voted against recognizing marital rape as a crime in 1997. In October last year, he was criticized for rejecting the idea of gender-balanced cabinets. And a photo from February this year seemed to reinforce this reputation: it showed the leading negotiators of the CDU/CSU coalition for a joint government with the SPD - all middle-aged men.
Merz is also unpopular in eastern Germany, where he regularly lagged behind both Alice Weidel and Olaf Scholz in opinion polls during the election campaign - apparently in part because of his belligerent attitude towards Russia.
Merz's problem with "Alternative for Germany"
Merz seems to think that with the apparent rise of right-wing populism around the world, people want straightforward leadership. But by all accounts, populism is not making him more popular. Instead of making the "Alternative for Germany"'s popularity to start falling and the CDU to rise, as he had promised in 2018 when he announced his candidacy for the CDU leadership, the exact opposite has happened: Since Merz took over the party in January 2022, its rating has not budged, while the AfD's has doubled.
Of course, Merz has not yet become chancellor. Ursula Münch suggests that he may be able to keep his promise to the AfD if his government can operate without the internal problems that plagued Scholz's coalition. It also matters whether the new cabinet faces serious problems such as the pandemic or an escalation of the war in Ukraine, which could force the chancellor to change his strategy again.
"The best way to keep the AfD unpopular is not to make random statements about big changes in refugee policy that you can't implement," says Münch. "These are concrete measures that people also notice. But this is not something that a new government can change overnight. People need to be given confidence again, and this will only be possible when the economic outlook becomes more positive and the number of refugees decreases."
Merz was initially considered a strong candidate precisely because of his business experience (he was a member of the board of the investment company BlackRock for several years), which was supposed to be a signal of his economic acumen. In the last few years, however, his populist statements have increasingly been linked to immigration, and this has not helped him shake off the "Alternative for Germany".
Author: Ben Knight