318. The Chancellor

In May of 2025, Friedrich Merz took office as Chancellor of Germany with an approval rating of approximately 50 percent. This is the kind of number that sounds normal, because it is. Half the country. A coin toss in your favor.

Twelve months later, his approval rating is 15 percent.

I want to describe what that journey looks like, because the data does not go in a straight line. (I am not making this up.) The approval did not simply fall from 50 to 15 the way a thing falls from a window. It went: 50, 50, 49, 49, 46, 45, 40, 32, 43, and then continued downward from there until it arrived at 15, which is a number more commonly associated with the percentage of Germans who answer survey calls from unknown numbers than with the number who endorse their sitting head of government.

Germany, I should note, is a country famous for things working correctly. The autobahn. The appliances. The trains, though the trains have had some issues. The broader reputation for engineering and precision remains intact. The Chancellor is a separate category.

Fifteen percent means that if you gathered one hundred randomly selected German adults into a room, eighty-five of them would describe his performance as not satisfactory, which in German has several words depending on the specific nature of the dissatisfaction. I understand these are many words.

The people who remain in the fifteen percent are, presumably, committed.

Friedrich Merz is still Chancellor. The approval rating is a measurement, not a removal mechanism. This is the part where the German engineering metaphor breaks down somewhat, because a machine with a 15 percent success rate would typically be recalled.

The Chancellor has not been recalled. He is scheduled to continue governing until someone else wins an election. This is expected to happen in 2029, which is three years from now, which means the fifteen percent has time to go somewhere. The direction is not specified.