Merz dared to challenge Trump. Now their relationship is in tatters

It all seemed to be going so well for the German chancellor when he sat down with Donald Trump in the Oval Office in March.

“The chancellor has been very well received in Germany, he’s a very successful man ... and he’s doing a very good job, a great job ... very popular,” the US president said before the White House press pack, as Friedrich Merz sat beside him.

Mr Merz’s expression gave little away, but he must have felt like the cat that got the cream. His comments a few days prior, in which he gave full-throated support to the US war on Iran, had paid off.

But two months on, this unlikely “bromance” between Mr Merz and Mr Trump – one an avowed transatlanticist, the other trying to claw his way out of Nato – has unravelled.

The cause, ironically, was also the Trump administration’s ill-fated war on Iran, with Mr Merz daring to claim that the regime had “humiliated” the United States with its shrewd tactics.

The barbed remarks referred not only to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which caught the Americans off guard and has caused global trade chaos, but also the US failure to topple the Iranian regime after eight weeks.

“He doesn’t know what he’s talking about!” Mr Trump seethed in a post on his Truth Social network, in a reversal of his position on the centre-right Christian Democrats leader. “No wonder Germany is doing so poorly, both economically, and otherwise!”

Allies of the president will be quick to note that he was responding in kind: after all, Mr Merz began as a vocal supporter of the Iran war but has changed his position now that it is going, to put it mildly, not quite according to plan.

The public falling-out brings to a close the cosy relationship between the chancellor and president, who otherwise has little to offer but scorn for leaders on the Continent.

It also follows a similar rupture between Mr Trump and Giorgia Meloni after she leapt to the defence of the Pope when the US president called him “weak”.

In both cases, the decision to stand up for a fellow European leader – or turn a deaf ear while Mr Trump is excoriating one – played a defining role in each relationship with the US.

In Ms Meloni’s case, she felt she could not stand idly by while the Pope, of all people, was being denigrated by an American president.

Mr Merz faced the same dilemma during that cosy March meeting in the Oval Office with Mr Trump.

After heaping praise on Germany’s leader, the president moved straight on to tirades against Sir Keir Starmer and then Pedro Sánchez, the Spanish premier. Mr Merz decided to remain silent.

The Prime Minister was “no Winston Churchill”, Mr Trump said as he excoriated Sir Keir for refusing to join the war, while Mr Merz sat in meek silence beside him. As for Mr Sánchez, the president threatened an embargo on Spain for refusing to allow US planes to use Spanish bases to attack Iran.

After the visit, German officials insisted that Mr Merz later confronted the president about those remarks in private. Most German newspapers were unimpressed all the same, while Mr Sánchez rebuked Mr Merz as a “vassal paying homage” to Mr Trump.

That uncomfortable moment illustrates the delicate tightrope that all US allies must now walk, where maintaining a good relationship with both Mr Trump and European allies is extremely difficult.

The row could not have come at a worse time for Germany’s chancellor, as he recently received the not lightly bestowed title of “world’s most unpopular leader” from a US pollster.

According to a survey by Morning Consult, which compared 24 democratic world leaders, Mr Merz has an approval rating of 19 per cent, putting him in last place.

Even Mr Trump outpaced Mr Merz in the popularity rankings, despite turmoil at home linked to the Iran war, as did Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Turkish president.

Mr Merz himself seems to be feeling the strain, as reflected in an ill-tempered interview he gave to the German magazine Der Spiegel this week, marking his first year in power.

“No chancellor before me has had to endure anything like this,” the German leader said, referring to the stiff criticism he had faced about the economic fallout from a war he initially supported. “I’m not complaining, but that’s how it is.”

[Source: Daily Telegraph]