Chancellor Friedrich Merz hosts Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Hanover today, but the real action is to the north on Germany’s Baltic Sea coast.
For weeks now, alongside news of war and economic shock, Germans have been gripped by the fate of a stranded whale.
The adult male, a 12-meter (40-foot) humpback, was first spotted in early March after straying off course into the relative shallows of the Baltic and getting stuck on a sandbank. It has repeatedly refloated only to get into trouble again, becoming ever weaker.
It’s a tempting allegory for the political fate of Merz, the conservative leader who just can’t seem to catch a break.
After less than a year in office, his ratings are abysmal: 80% of respondents in a recent poll said they disapproved of his performance.
The reasons are not hard to fathom.
His pledge to re-energize the economy has yet to yield results, and measures announced last week to soften the blow of surging oil prices were denounced as too timid or unworkable.
They included a 1,000 euro ($1,180) giveaway to workers to be voluntarily paid by employers. Even the federal government said it wouldn’t participate.
Merz’s coalition is reduced to infighting reminiscent of the administration it replaced, helping the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) lead in polls.
Underlining the sense of drift, voters see Berlin as having little influence over the Iran war.
Merz, like other leaders, can do little about US President Donald Trump’s global mayhem. It’s a point in common with leftist Lula.
In the Baltic, a rescue operation is under way to take the whale back out to the North Sea.
But the chances of success remain slim.
For Merz, state elections in the former Communist east in September threaten to bring the AfD to regional power for the first time.
Time is running short to get his floundering chancellorship back on track. — Alan Crawford