There is something almost admirable about Friedrich Merz's persistence. He lost the CDU leadership race in 2018, losing narrowly to Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer after winning 48 percent of the delegate vote. He ran again in 2021 and lost to Armin Laschet. He finally won the membership vote in December 2021, on his third attempt. He became Chancellor in April 2025. The man wanted the job, and he was prepared to wait a quarter of a century for it. Whether he was equally prepared to do the job is a more complicated question.
A brief history of not quite making it
Merz and Angela Merkel co-led the CDU in the early 2000s — he as parliamentary group chairman, she as party chairwoman — and the relationship was never warm. When the Union lost the 2002 federal election, Merkel removed him as faction leader. He never entirely accepted that. In 2005 he did not join Merkel's cabinet. By 2009 he had left parliament altogether to work in the private sector, most notably at BlackRock. The 2018 leadership run was his attempted comeback. It didn't go smoothly, and neither did the ones that followed.
The relationship with Merkel never fully repaired itself. When Merz, in a televised interview in 2019, called her government "catastrophically bad" and accused her of inactivity, it read less like political criticism and more like a score that had never been settled. That history matters now, because Merkel broke her post-chancellery silence in early 2025 to publicly say that Merz's approach to working with the AfD was wrong — a word choice that was neither vague nor accidental.
The promises
Three commitments defined Merz's campaign. The first was the Brandmauer — the so-called firewall separating the CDU from the far-right AfD. Under no circumstances, he said, would his party seek or accept AfD support for its legislation. This held for approximately as long as it needed to in order to win the election. In January and February 2025, before he had even formally taken office, the CDU/CSU brought migration motions to the Bundestag knowing they would only pass with AfD votes. They passed. It was the first time since the post-war founding of the Federal Republic that a mainstream democratic party had deliberately used far-right votes to advance its agenda. Merkel called it wrong. Much of the political establishment agreed.
The second promise concerned the debt brake — the constitutional mechanism limiting government borrowing that Merz had held up as a guarantee of fiscal responsibility. He had spent years criticising the previous government for its approach to debt. In March 2025, weeks before he took office, Merz pushed through the outgoing Bundestag a €500 billion credit-financed special fund for infrastructure and climate protection, alongside a weakening of the constitutional articles governing the debt brake to allow expanded military spending. The policy may or may not have been necessary. What it was not was what he had promised.
The third was more mundane. Three days before the federal election, Merz stated directly: raising VAT would be "the biggest poison for the economy." VAT increases followed.
In his first year in office, Merz broke the three commitments that had most clearly defined his campaign — one on democratic principle, one on fiscal policy, one on taxation.
The communication problem
What makes all of this harder to navigate politically is that Merz consistently creates additional problems through the way he communicates. The policy errors would be difficult enough on their own. The presentation makes them worse.
The list of specific incidents is not short. On election night he described the victory celebration at CDU headquarters as a "Rambo-Zambo" — a phrase that generated bewilderment rather than enthusiasm. At a public appearance in autumn 2025, he referred to migrants' visible presence in German cities using the phrase "Stadtbild" — cityscape — in a way that ignited immediate controversy. The subsequent official transcript on the Chancellor's website omitted the sentence in question, which generated a second round of criticism. In July 2025, during a diplomatic visit, he mangled Austrian President Van der Bellen's name and then corrected himself incorrectly. His appearance at the Republica conference in May 2025 was widely described as an embarrassment.
Within the coalition itself, matters have been no smoother. A public dispute about whether Merz had shouted at his own Vice Chancellor produced the remarkable spectacle of the two men unable to agree on whether the incident had occurred. An independent analysis of his first year in office by the Handelsblatt noted that Merz himself had admitted deficiencies in his communication — a concession that is at least honest, if not entirely reassuring.
Where things stand
According to Morning Consult polling from spring 2026, Friedrich Merz holds the lowest approval rating of any democratically elected head of government among the 24 countries surveyed: 19 percent approval, 76 percent disapproval. Domestic polling puts the figure lower still — around 15 percent satisfied, 83 percent not. The CDU has, in some polls, fallen behind the AfD. Union and SPD together command somewhere between 34 and 40 percent of voter support — a coalition governing a country that, by a significant majority, does not want it to.
None of this means the government will fall imminently, or that some of its policies won't ultimately prove more successful than the numbers currently suggest. Politics is long and poll numbers shift. But after 25 years of wanting the chancellorship, and having spent much of that time criticising the people who held it before him, the first year has not made a strong case that Merz had a clearer idea of how to do it better. What it has shown is that the distance between campaigning for a job and doing it remains, as ever, considerable.