German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is not a popular guy these days. Last week, he had to make a veiled threat to call for a confidence vote and risk the collapse of the government to get his ‘security package’ approved by parliament, and now he finds out the general public doesn’t have much confidence in him either.
According to a poll from Institut Forsa, cited by Bild, the number of Germans who say they trust Scholz has dropped precipitously in the past four years, from 75% in 2020 to a measly 20% today.
His ‘traffic light coalition,’ composed of his own social democratic SDP, the liberal FDP, and the Greens, is—unsurprisingly—not faring much better. Four years ago, 63% of Germans polled said they trust the sitting government. Today, only 21% do.
Fewer and fewer Germans also feel like the government understands them. In response to the statement, “Politicians know what concerns citizens in their everyday lives,” only 17% agreed and 2% said they “don’t know.”
Only 24% of Germans today agree that “the state can fulfill its tasks,” compared to 56% (already a pretty terrible statement of public trust) in 2020.
Opinion researcher Manfred Güllner, founder and leader of the Forsa Institute, told Bild the SPD and the Greens have “concerned [themselves] too much with fringe groups and issues (such as cannabis legalization) and not with the interests of the vast majority” and said the FDP, for their part, has “disappointed its core clientele, the German middle class, because bureaucratic restrictions have not decreased as hoped, but have actually increased.”
