Friedrich Merz, head of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) Party and Chancellor of Germany for a little over a year now, is not a very popular guy.
He’s just recently reached a historic new low in polling after hanging around the 15% mark for the past couple of weeks.
🚨🇩🇪 Merz hits ROCK BOTTOM.
Chancellor Friedrich Merz is now the MOST UNPOPULAR top politician in Germany, INSA poll shows.
Personal approval down to a HISTORIC LOW of just 13%.
A few months in office and already political free fall. pic.twitter.com/guiY3O0VEL
— Global Dissident (@GlobalDiss) May 30, 2026
The business climate in the country is abysmal, with shocking new data out that reveals how devastating the one-two punch of immigration and Green policies has been to the entrepreneurial class.
The shrinking small retail store base, often the heart of smaller burgs and villages, is a sign of serious weakness in the economy and a foreboding harbinger of worse to come.
Germany: 65,000 small retail stores have disappeared as economic downturn continues to hit Europe’s ‘powerhouse’
The number of small retail stores in Germany has declined drastically since 2010. According to a recent analysis by the credit agency Creditreform and the Handelsblatt Research Institute, there were 236,143 small retail stores with annual sales of less than €250,000 in 2010. For 2025, the sales tax statistics show only 170,770 such stores, a drop of 28 percent, reports Junge Freiheit.
Across all size categories, the number of stores shrank by only 16 percent during the same period, meaning the smaller, owner-operated players are being hit far harder. Small and medium-sized enterprises have been left with barely any financial reserves, a bad sign for the country’s battle with continuous bankruptcies.
According to the report, just over 316,000 retail stores overall remain. The German Retail Federation (HDE) warns that the number of stores could drop below 300,000 in 2026, threatening the vitality of city centers.
But it’s hard not to have such conditions when your core industrial base has transmuted from a manufacturing and industrial titan to a bureaucratic behemoth. One is an engine that drives all things before it. The other simply gobbles up as it goes.
This chart helps explain why the German economy is falling apart. Instead of starting small businesses, Germans prefer to “work” for the government.
A nation cannot stay prosperous with such a mindset. Only entrepreneurialism and free markets create prosperity, not the state. pic.twitter.com/Zu7vrJ9TiE
— Michael A. Arouet (@MichaelAArouet) April 27, 2026
Americans know, as do their candidates, that small businesses are essential to a robust economy, producing the jobs, incentives, and tax base that, in turn, help fuel growth.
The Germans have begun feeding on the state, and that is unsustainable.
The numbers are staggering, and you have to remember that in Germany, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are state-funded, as well.
Trump disbanded our closest equivalent, USAID, and has cut off hundreds of billions in handouts already.
@MichaelAArouet Since 2019, Germany has lost more than 1.5 million jobs that generated net tax revenue, due to insolvencies and companies abandoning operations here to rebuild them in Asia, the United States, and elsewhere. BASF, for example, dismantled multi-billion-euro plants…
— @coresecret.eu (@coresecret_eu) April 27, 2026
…BASF, for example, dismantled multi-billion-euro plants in Germany and rebuilt them in China.
In stark contrast, the public sector, comprising federal, state and municipal jobs that produce only net costs, has been expanded by roughly 500,000 positions under the Olaf Scholz government alone.
The overall state spending quota, which now includes hundreds of thousands of NGO employees actively accelerating Germany’s decline, exceeds 50%. The annual costs of Bürgergeld for illegal migrants, the administration surrounding it, health insurance contributions that taxpayers are forced to cover, development aid and state subsidies for tens of thousands of progressive NGOs already add up to 130–150 billion euros per year. On top of that, 172 billion euros per year is earmarked for rearmament until 2029, as well as 200 billion euros in subsidies for pensions and social security and 100 billion euros in interest payments.
Germany is already bankrupt and profoundly so. The chart you posted shows only the visible tip of the iceberg.
This is also precisely why one of the first things Trump did when he took office was to begin slashing the bloated federal bureaucracy, whose size had increased by 6% under his predecessor. More Biden inflation.
In spite of the tremendous pushback and unceasing legal battles, the administration has been culling the federal herd pretty effectively, a painful but ultimately necessary step, leaving the current workforce the smallest it’s been since 2011.
The Trump administration will continue working to shrink the size of the federal workforce after already shedding more than 300,000 employees, a White House official said on Thursday, who suggested a leaner civil service will be more effective as a result of its reduced stability.
Continuing to reduce the size of the federal government and its workforce remains “priority number one,” Office of Management and Budget Deputy Director for Management Eric Ueland said at a government efficiency conference in Washington, adding it would contribute to the goal of tackling waste, fraud and abuse. He pledged that individual agencies would ensure consistent and transparent communication on their plans, so employees would at least have a clear roadmap of what is to come even if they disagree with the destination.
“At the end of the day, if they walk away, even if they disagree with that goal, even if they disagree with that reorganization, even if they disagree with the potentiality that there may no longer be an opportunity for them to serve inside the federal government,” Ueland said, “that we have been very clear and we have communicated responsibly and expansively with them, so that they at least appreciate and understand where it is that we’re going and what it is we’re trying to do.”
Chancellor Merz seems frozen with indecision, and the ones he does make are uniformly derided.
The current suggestion on the table that has hard-pressed Germans howling at the moon and baying for blood is one that strikes at the very heart of both German thriftiness and their concept of passing on assets in order to take care of the elderly.
Older German couples scrimp and save to have a fully paid-for home by the time they reach their dotage, and, traditionally, this has meant that younger family members could then move in with them. The younger folks take care of the older generation as payment, if you will, for a rent-free roof over their heads.
It also reinforces traditional German family ties, as children grow up with elderly grandparents in the home.
Welp.
Merz has bills to pay, and nothing seems to annoy the Eurotrash elite more than middle-class older folks who might still ‘own’ something, yet expect the benefits they worked for and that the state promised them on top of it. If the older folks need advanced care that only a facility provides, then insurance the elderly pay for, and eventually the state will pick up the tab, should that situation arise.
Merz’s CDU is suggesting it’s time that the time-honored system changed. Nothing remotely mentioned about removing illegals and immigrants from the state dole first.
Just removing German families from homes they’d worked and paid for, and still pay taxes on.
A senior lawmaker from Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s CDU has proposed requiring Germans to use their homes to pay for elderly care, triggering a political row over social welfare amid the country’s mounting fiscal pressures.
The proposal by Albert Stegemann, deputy chairman of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group in the Bundestag, would tighten eligibility rules for public assistance with nursing-home costs, potentially requiring homeowners to draw on property wealth before receiving state support.
“Those who own assets must first use their own assets, including their home, before the community pays,” Stegemann told Bild on Thursday.
Germany’s long-term care system works in three stages. Mandatory insurance covers part of nursing-home costs, with patients expected to pay the remainder from their pension, savings or other assets. If those funds are exhausted, state social welfare assistance covers the gap.
Stegemann argues that homeowners should be required to draw on housing wealth before gaining access to that final layer of taxpayer-funded support.
Having already surpassed the floundering CDU in the polls, this latest attack on what few ‘German’ standards of living remain was another opening for Alice Weidel, head of the right-wing Alternativ for Germany (AfD) Party.
With the state the country is in at the moment, those conditions, living with elderly relatives for the young couple, are often the only way they can get ahead. This would throw those often young families out on the streets and into rental markets that are already insanely overpriced and tight because of the migrant situation.
Merz verrät die, die ihm vertraut haben: Jetzt will die CDU auf Eigenheime und Einkommen der Kinder zugreifen, um Pflege zu finanzieren. Der nächste Schlag gegen die Leistungsträger des Landes. Nur die AfD ist Partei der arbeitenden Mitte.https://t.co/VRUyWjkGMy
— Alice Weidel (@Alice_Weidel) June 1, 2026
Merz betrays those who trusted him: Now the CDU wants to tap into family homes and children’s income to finance care. The next blow against the country’s performers. Only the AfD is the party of the working middle.
So, yes, Merz has been a domestic disaster as well as an international one. Facing what is shaping up to be a September local election blowout in the state of Saxony-Anhalt…
BREAKING:
The AfD reaches a record-high 42% in the latest opinion poll ahead of the state election in Saxony-Anhalt.
If they win 44+% of the votes in the Sept. election, they’ll likely win a majority in the state parliament & Saxony-Anhalt will become the 1st state ruled by AfD pic.twitter.com/z6deKrAjUa
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) May 14, 2026
…it won’t come as a surprise that the coup whispers are flying behind Merz’s back after barely a year in office.
It is a story grimly familiar in Britain.
A leader barely into his term finds himself battling coup plots, dismal poll ratings, a resurgent Right and constant speculation over his position.
In steps a younger, more popular rival from the industrial heartlands. Someone who promises to win over a fractured electorate with his sleeker brand of politics.
Much like Sir Keir Starmer, who is battling a potential leadership challenge from Andy Burnham, Friedrich Merz is doing all he can to cling on.
The German chancellor has been beset by rumours this week that members of his own party are plotting to remove him.
Senior figures within the centre-Right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) have become so frustrated with Mr Merz’s performance that they are privately discussing whether he should be replaced before the next federal election, several German newspapers are reporting.
With the CDU slipping ever further behind the hard-Right AfD in national polls – and 71 per cent of Germans thinking Mr Merz is doing a bad job – MPs have openly questioned the Chancellor’s ability to reverse the party’s fortunes.
A 50-year-old CDU politician named Henrik Wüst has his eyes coyly on the prize, which is only adding to the Chancellor’s angst.
And when you read a little about him, Mr. Wüst sounds like a terrible replacement for an already terrible chancellor- he’d be more of exactly what brought them to this place to begin with.
…Those spreading these wüste Spekulationen — a pun on Mr Wüst’s surname that translates as “wild speculation” — were “playing with fire” and “doing the work of the AfD”, came the furious response from within the Chancellor’s inner circle.
Mr Wüst, by contrast, is a polished public performer with immaculate hair and designer glasses who has firm control of his image.
Governing alongside the Greens in Düsseldorf, he has cultivated his position as an heir to Angela Merkel’s safe and centrist brand of politics.
Merz might be awful, but no one needs Angela Part Zwei.
The Germans are starting to remind me of Woody’s headache.
They have a perpetual case of Merkel migraine and can’t for the life of them figure out why.
Editor’s Note: President Trump is leading America into the “Golden Age” as Democrats try desperately to stop it.
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