Out of the dark

The people's chancellor; musical chairs; cash-only

Photo by Adrien Olichon on Unsplash

Dear Reader,

Friedrich Merz wasn’t particularly popular before February’s election. Two months—and a highly controversial new debt package—later, his polling figures liegen im Keller.

A new poll for Stern magazine found that just one in five Germans think that Merz is trustworthy, while one in four believe he understands the issues that matter to normal people. A slightly better 40 percent of respondents say he has strong leadership skills.

There is one thing that he scores well on, though: 60 percent said that you can understand him when he talks.

That might sound like a pretty low bar for success for a the leader of the biggest democracy in Europe. But, coming after Olaf Scholz, it is a quality that many voters will be yearning for.

We have a chance for a little compare and contrast here.

Within a month of becoming Chancellor in late 2021, Scholz gave a New Year’s address to the nation. The address is indistinguishable from a speech Scholz would give to a room full of party delegates. His sentences are long and full of sub-clauses and jargon. He uses the word “we” repeatedly, but always to refer to his government—something that builds an implicit barrier between himself and the nation he is addressing. Throughout, there is no change in tone; he makes no attempt at humour or anything that could be interpreted as a human touch.

As an aside, Scholz only mentions the build-up of Russian troops on the border with Ukraine in passing, at the very end of the speech. The man who marketed himself as boring-but-brilliant obviously failed to see the largest storm of the 21st century brewing on the horizon.

Merz has just instituted a new tradition—an Easter address to the nation. Showing that he perhaps does understand social media after all, it comes in at a snappy three minutes. When he uses the word “we”, he is referring to the entire German nation. He avoids going into tedious detail about his policy programme, instead using the speech to create a sense of optimism; he throws in a light-hearted comment that Easter reminds us that “after the dark days comes the light” and even manages a smile.

It is almost as if Merz studied Scholz’ first address to the nation and tried to do the opposite. The CDU leader has understood that good governance is as much about how you talk to the electorate as about the results you deliver. That is a start.