‘What hope does the EU have, with its No.1 power in such a crisis?’

A week in the life of the man set to be the most powerful in the EU

Montage © Facts4EU.Org 2025

* ‘Only 21% trust the new Chancellor’ – a week before he even takes office, reports German state broadcaster

* Germany’s stats agency helpfully announces 33 years of trade surplus with Trump’s United States

* And “in uncertain times” Germans are turning to drugs, as cocaine use doubles, says Federal Commissioner

With just over a week until he should – all things being well – become Chancellor of Germany, the headlines just keep getting worse for Friedrich Merz. Even for British observers, his falling popularity and apparent propensity to do the opposite for what he promises, cannot fail to register.

On Friday (25 April 2025) here is the headline from the German state broadcaster, Deutsche Welle (DW).

The following day (Saturday), this was followed up by:

"We are living in uncertain times, and in these times people are increasingly turning to drugs," wrote the Federal Government Commissioner for Addiction and Drugs, Burkhard Blienert. According to him, more than twice as many German people are using cocaine than just a few years ago. “This makes cocaine the clear number one illegal drug in Germany," he stated.

These two stories come on the back of an equally unhelpful headline from the German government’s own statistics agency, Destatis, which declared:

“33 years of export surplus in trade with the United States”.

With President Trump still deciding on the details of his trade policy with the EU, a headline like this does not sound as if it would go down too well in the White House. It adds to the news the previous week that the US is by far Germany’s largest trading partner.

How did trust break down so quickly between Germany’s Chancellor-Elect and his people?

Within a week of winning the German general election, Friedrich Merz had broken the first of two cast-iron promises to the German people. In a sense, both of these were peculiarly German issues. The first was his guarantee not to work with the right-wing AfD party who came second in the election. This is a German ‘thing’ because of the wall the other German political parties had thrown around the insurgent AfD, some of whose right-wing policies are anathema to other politicians. Instead of keeping to his word, he relied on the AfD to get an important vote passed.

The second happened only three weeks later and was constitutional. The constitution matters in Germany, as it was formed only a few years after the end of the Second World War. Merz had promised he would not touch the condition which essentially says the government must balance its books. Instead, he railroaded through an amendment allowing him to borrow an astonishing trillion euros to fund a variety of policies. In amongst this he was forced to promise the Greens an enormous sum for net zero projects, without whose vote his amendment would have failed. In so doing, he also used the votes of MPs who had failed to win re-election at the general election but who could still vote as the new parliament had not yet been formed. He would not have won without this.

In a poll carried out by the public broadcaster ZDF,73% of Germans felt that Merz had deceived them, despite his lame protestations that he did the volte-face because ‘the world has changed’.

[ Sources: Destatis | German media ] Politicians and journalists can contact us for details, as ever.

Brexit Facts4EU.Org, Mon 28 Apr 2025

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