Friedrich Merz has a Friedrich Merz problem

BERLIN — The trouble with Friedrich Merz is that when things get difficult, he can make them even more difficult.

At a press conference this week, the German chancellor had barely begun addressing yet another disastrous set of election results when he stopped to rebuke a man moving in front of the cameras. “Haven’t you found a seat? Because you’re blocking the view for a lot of other people.”

The icy tone was fleeting, but telling. In the face of crushing political pressure, Merz is trying to convince Germans that he can revive the economy, reform the welfare state, and halt the flight of voters to the political extremes, such as the far-right Alternative for Germany party and the Left party, both of which clinched victories in state elections over the weekend. 

Yet his combative public manner repeatedly gets in the way of the message. The irony is that the Merz I’ve seen away from the cameras can be engaging and capable of laughing at himself. His political problem is that too few voters ever see that side of him. 

Criticism of Merz’s manner is no longer just about style. His personal manner is cited as one of the reasons the Christian Democrats fared so badly in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania: For the first time in the party’s postwar history, they failed to clear the 5% threshold for entering a state parliament. 

Aloof, confrontational and lacking in empathy — these have been frequent accusations as Merz has taken to the airwaves during the regional election season to fight his corner, sometimes making matters worse. 

One encounter earlier this month was particularly damaging. In a televised roundtable, pediatrician and influencer Bea Merscher attacked his record on health spending as “inhumane.” Merz angrily told her she was “going too far,” described doctors as “beneficiaries” of the health system, and added: “You are doctors. You couldn’t get by without this health system.” 

Fact checks found Merz largely right on the substance of health spending and reform — but he lost on tone. The public tends to prefer doctors to politicians in a bare-knuckle prime-time fight. 

“His problem is that he argues with opponents as though they are another politician or a board member,” a person who worked with him in opposition told me, confidentially, so as not to draw the chancellor’s ire. “He doesn’t think about how it looks from the sofa in front of the TV.” 

Yet there is another, more surprising Merz — one I have encountered over years on the international circuit, in brief conversations, small dinners and events where, once he loosens his tie, a more personable character emerges. 

When we first met, at a dinner in 2022 to discuss Germany’s laggardly response to the war in Ukraine, I pressed Merz — then opposition leader — on why he had not pushed then Chancellor Olaf Scholz harder to send longer-range weapons to Kyiv. His answer was evasive. Over a glass of Sekt afterwards, I risked saying so. 

It could have gone either way. Merz can end conversations sharply if he feels he is being treated badly. But he can also have a wry charm. He joked that I was being “very testing,” before explaining that he did not want to appear to be backseat-driving the government as the conflict intensified. 

I had another go when our paths crossed at an Airbus factory in the U.K. in 2025, where he appeared with then Prime Minister Keir Starmer — who, to Merz’s amusement, called him simply “Friedrich,” an informality unusual in German politics. Again, Merz wavered on the sensitive question of supplying Taurus missiles to Ukraine. Again, I pressed him on the omission. 

He saw the funny side. “You again!” he observed the next time we met. 

There was another glimpse of that Merz when I asked whether he planned to congratulate former Chancellor Angela Merkel on her birthday. The question forced him into elaborate good wishes for the predecessor with whom he has had a famously testy relationship, after she bested him in the struggle for control of the CDU and, in his view, steered the party too far to the left. 

“Of course! We should all do that!” he replied — and laughed. 

These moments matter because Merz’s public image has hardened around a very different figure: formal, wealthy and remote from the instincts of many voters. A former corporate lawyer and BlackRock Germany chair, he has never made much effort to disguise the fruits of success in a country that tends to prefer its wealth worn with stealth.

For years, that included his private plane and a taste for expensive cars. Since becoming chancellor, he has toned down the high life. Paradoxically, that may have made him appear more desiccated, not less: the Merz who is enjoying himself is often more engaging than the Merz who is trying hard to look chancellor-like. 

Merz’s instinct under pressure is to answer with more detail and more reform. A 34-point plan to revive Germany invited mockery for its complexity, while the AfD campaigned hard against his proposal to raise the retirement age to 67 and was rewarded at the ballot box. 

Now he needs to not only move faster, but also better sell his case: that state reforms will create new jobs and make pensions affordable in the future. Right now, many Germans think reforms will simply take something away from them. 

Andreas Rödder, a leading German political historian and Christian Democrat who once ran for chancellor, has long warned that Merz’s “firewall” against the far right would fail. He thinks the chancellor’s strategy of continuing and hoping the reforms eventually pay off is doomed. 

He argues that Merz lacks the courage to break with the Social Democrats and pursue reforms that are being slowed by tensions inside the coalition. Like others who have had on-off relations with Merz, Rödder also points to an oversensitivity to criticism and a tendency to discard people he has fallen out with rather than win them round. 

“Just saying, ‘I am staying where I am’ is not an answer here,” Rödder told me. “The question is why he doesn’t see that. He announces swathes of reforms and yet it is unclear how he can really deliver them in this coalition, so people stop believing what they hear.”

It is, as Rödder puts it, a paradox: Merz had the courage and toughness to run for the CDU leadership three times. Yet the relaxed and self-aware Merz visible in private has remained largely hidden from the voters he now needs to persuade. He is a hard-working, pragmatic chancellor who knows many of the cues are suddenly uncertain, which the economic giant of a country needs.

The question is whether he has the means and agility to learn what has gone wrong — and learn to speak to Germans anyway, winning over hearts and minds — when both have sorely deserted him.

Anne McElvoy is a Global Reporter for the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network.

The Axel Springer Global Reporters Network harnesses the resources of the company’s newsrooms to publish ambitious scoops, investigations, interviews, opinion pieces and analysis. It allows journalists — including those from POLITICO, The Telegraph, Business Insider, WELT, BILD, Onet and Fakt — to collaborate on major stories for an international audience of hundreds of millions across platforms: online, print, TV and audio.