Not to be outdone, a few weeks later Merz insisted to the Munich Security Conference\u2019s organizers that he wanted to break with convention and give the opening address. With everyone fearing a repeat of U.S. Vice President JD Vance\u2019s menace the year before, the chancellor took it upon himself to try and galvanize. His message: The world order is over; European complacency is over; but at the same time, Europe won\u2019t apologize for its values. It was a speech that stiffened the sinews for what was to come.<\/p>\n
Make no mistake, Merz doesn\u2019t have the charisma of other leaders. But as Germany approaches the first anniversary of the elections that ushered out the anemic Social Democrat-led government of Olaf Scholz, it may well be that in this new chancellor, the country has found the leader Europe needs for these darkened, hardened times.<\/p>\n
Merz is no Carney \u2014 but the two may have more in common than they realize. A former central banker, Carney certainly looks the part of the leader he\u2019s become, but that wasn\u2019t always the case. In early 2025, staring into an abyss, Canada\u2019s Liberals decided to dump then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Then, just weeks after taking over, Carney called a general election and, against the odds, defeated populist conservative Pierre Poilievre.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The person he really had to thank, however, was the incoming president south of the border who, after just a few months in office, had already vowed to absorb Canada as the 51st U.S. state. These are trying times for those who refuse to kowtow to Trump, but for Carney, they appear to be paying dividends \u2014 his approval ratings are now at their highest<\/a> since he took office in March 2025.<\/p>\n So, might the same happen to fellow centrist and ally Merz?\u00a0<\/p>\n Unfortunately, there are a lot of things working against the German leader. For one, his party\u2019s polling ratings remain doggedly low. The first poll of 2026 showed the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) extending its overall lead to 27 percent of the vote, while Merz\u2019s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) came in at 24 percent. The chancellor\u2019s personal popularity<\/a> remains in the doldrums as well, as only 23 percent satisfied with him, and even among CDU supporters, only just over half approve of their own leader.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Not to be outdone, a few weeks later Merz insisted to the Munich Security Conference\u2019s organizers that he…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":771757,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5310],"tags":[521,1395,21882,32,23433,28284,34,110718,2000,299,1105,1945,7336,11070,1824,70618,1195,601,807,2129,14791,332,479,6717,49,335],"class_list":["post-771756","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-germany","tag-asia","tag-china","tag-davos","tag-donald-trump","tag-economic-performance","tag-elections-in-europe","tag-emmanuel-macron","tag-energy-dependency","tag-eu","tag-europe","tag-far-right","tag-friedrich-merz","tag-german-election-2025","tag-german-politics","tag-germany","tag-germany-interpreted","tag-growth","tag-jd-vance","tag-keir-starmer","tag-mark-carney","tag-munich-security-conference","tag-russia","tag-tariffs","tag-transatlantic-relations","tag-united-states","tag-war-in-ukraine"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116089596332663568","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/771756","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=771756"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/771756\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/771757"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=771756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=771756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=771756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}