A Chancellor Dismantles Himself

Friedrich Merz dressed down a woman with terminal cancer in front of the cameras because she dared to ask the wrong question at a town-hall event. At the start of her remarks, she invited the chancellor to her own funeral. She added that she could not afford it. Then she asked how it could be that, as part of the health insurance reform, further cuts to life-saving cancer screening were already being planned while the government had only just tried to grant itself a massive pay rise. Why was money being saved on ordinary people, but not on those in power?

A good question, asked in dramatic circumstances.

For the chancellor, it could have been a great moment to show human decency and a connection with ordinary citizens. An open goal for someone with empathy and a feel for people’s worries. Instead, it turned into a catastrophe.

Merz did not say a single word about the health situation of a visibly nervous citizen who had summoned all her courage to express her anger. Instead, he lectured the woman five times in a row that there had “at no point” been any plan to raise government salaries. “AT NO POINT!”

In fact, the woman was right. It was only thanks to the measured intervention of CSU Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt that politicians’ salaries were not increased. So yes, it had been planned and it had been reported across the media.

But that is not the point.

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The Empathy Test

In this rare television moment, citizens could see something else entirely: a chancellor who, in the face of a dying woman, was unable to offer even a single sympathetic word, an expression of regret or an offer of help before addressing the substance of the issue. He managed neither. The woman had invited him to her own funeral. In response, she was brusquely and aggressively lectured from above.

Since then, criticism has rained down across the media over the chancellor’s lack of empathy. He is said to listen to only a very small circle of confidants. A communications expert does not appear to be among them. Yet to speak merely of a public relations disaster is not enough and does not do justice to the drama of the situation.

Friedrich Merz, who is now in charge as chancellor for one year, likes to explain the world to others, but he apparently no longer understands it himself. The British Guardian calls it Merzsplaining, although one could also simply describe it as the self-importance of a man who has lost contact with ordinary people.

The Court Turns Restless

Political Berlin has long been speaking anxiously of a looming government crisis, given the dysfunctional relationship between the CDU and its coalition partner, the SPD. While Merz describes cooperation with the Social Democrats as “without alternative” and refuses even to consider other governing options, various scenarios are already being loudly discussed quite openly and through the media. The options range from replacing Merz, perhaps with Markus Söder of the CSU, to using a no-confidence vote in the Bundestag to clear the way or breaking the coalition with the SPD altogether and forming a minority government.

Figures such as the influential MP and long-time Merz confidant Christian von Stetten are now saying openly and with evident frustration that they do not believe the current government can survive the next four years until the end of the legislative term. In view of the government’s paralysis, he said, Union MPs must ask themselves whether it is even worth traveling to Berlin for a parliamentary sitting week.

Von Stetten’s interview landed like a bomb in political Berlin. He chairs the parliamentary group for small and medium-sized businesses within the parliamentary party and thus represents the voice of business people and entrepreneurs in the CDU. The disappointment there runs deep. The much-heralded “autumn of reforms” that Merz had promised for autumn 2025 never came.

Apart from running up debt, nothing much has happened. The planned health insurance reform will be especially expensive for families. The SPD, the junior coalition partner, treats tax reform as an invitation to demand higher taxes on top earners, even though precisely that was ruled out in the coalition agreement. Energy policy is going nowhere. The promised migration turnaround and the reform of the social benefit system are said to amount to little more than new labels for the same old policies.

These are, it should be noted, criticisms from the party’s own ranks, not from its political opponents. Among CDU members, anger at a chancellor who lets his smaller coalition partner dictate policy is even greater than it is across the country.

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The Cost of Standing Still

In the Germany that Merz either ignores or refuses to see, the bad news keeps piling up.

Merz himself has allowed the self-confident Vice Chancellor Lars Klingbeil to back him into a corner and quite clearly does not dare to make decisions against his coalition partner for fear that the government might fall apart. Merz wants to remain chancellor, whatever the cost. Even if it costs him his party, his credibility or the country. The result in Germany is above all one thing: paralysis. Nothing is decided, nothing is changed and carrying on as before only drives Germany deeper into crisis.

The economic situation, meanwhile, is so desolate that a good 1,500 companies file for insolvency every month. During Merz’s time as CDU chairman, the AfD has more than doubled in strength, although he took office with the confident declaration that he wanted to “halve” it. The CDU is losing ground in the polls every week, even among well-disposed polling institutes, and with a current standing of 22%–23% is moving dangerously close to the 20% mark, while the AfD, currently on 28% nationwide, is heading toward 30%.

At the same time, state and municipal elections are still due this year, which is steadily increasing nervousness at the CDU’s grassroots. What message are local campaigners supposed to take to voters in order to win their trust? Under Merz, the CDU has above all squandered credibility within a single year in government. A party that once stood for sound finances and for the enforcement of law and order has failed in its core areas of competence with historic debt and soaring violent crime. It has broken almost every campaign promise that Merz personally made.

Accordingly, the chancellor now ranks only 20th out of 20 among the country’s leading politicians in a recent survey by the INSA polling institute, while the Forsa institute reports that almost 80% of Germans are disappointed in him.

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A Classroom Becomes a Diplomatic Incident

And then, on an open stage, or rather during a banal school visit in front of teenagers, he also picks a fight with US President Donald Trump by letting the world know from a classroom that he considers NATO’s largest partner incapable and believes it is allowing itself to be “humiliated” in Iran. Merzsplaining at its best. Trump responds, predictably and impulsively, with threats to withdraw US troops from Germany and restore tariffs on vehicles to 25%.

Merz wants to be a statesman. He enjoys the foreign-policy role. Now he is also smashing Germany’s already strained relations with the US in passing.

Never before has a sitting chancellor dismantled himself so quickly in public or squandered the goodwill of his voters and most loyal supporters at such speed. What is most irritating is that he himself hardly seems to notice it and appears convinced above all of one thing: himself.