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. 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. 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.
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.
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