As magazine covers go, it certainly isn’t subtle. The latest issue of the German newsweekly Der Spiegel depicts U.S. President Donald Trump using a knife to behead the Statue of Liberty. While some German publications and politicians argued that Der Spiegel went too far, the magazine has certainly tapped into the zeitgeist of Germany today. Trump is highly unpopular there, recent polls show.
A survey by pollster Infratest dimap found that only 15 percent of Germans believe Trump is competent, and 87 percent say he’s not good for Germany. Another Infratest poll found that only 22 percent of Germans trust the United States as a partner, a steep drop of 37 percentage points since November.
The Infratest polls are in line with others. Three-quarters of respondents told a Kantar Emnid poll that they believe relations with the U.S. will worsen under Trump, while a YouGov poll conducted late last year found that 60 percent of Germans say Trump’s election has made the world a more dangerous place. Just 8 percent say he’s made it safer.
“This is not surprising,” says William Paterson, a professor of German politics at Britain’s Aston University. “He’s attacked Angela Merkel (the German chancellor), and people tend to react when they’re attacked.” Germany, he adds, is the most multilateral-minded country in Europe and it strongly supports the European Union and NATO.
Days before his Jan. 20 inauguration, Trump told Germany’s Bild newspaper that Merkel’s policy of allowing Syrian war refugees into Germany was “insane” and a “catastrophic mistake.”
Trump and Merkel talked by phone in late January, shortly after he issued his executive order banning travel into the U.S. from seven primarily Muslim countries. Her spokesman later said that Merkel “regrets” the ban, believes it’s not justified and betrays the Geneva Conventions on refugees — a point she made to him during their phone conversation.
To be sure, another Republican president, George W. Bush, also saw his popularity in Germany drop during his eight years in office. But at least he started out on the plus side of the ledger, garnering support from 51 percent of Germans at the start of his presidency, according to Pew Research Center.
Trump has been president for less than three weeks, but even before he was elected, Germans had a dim view of him. In the run-up to last November’s elections, German broadcaster Deutsche Welle reported that 86 percent of Germans favored his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, and only 4 percent backed Trump.
Merkel is up for re-election this fall, and while her center-right Christian Democratic Union party maintains a lead, a recent poll shows that the center-left Social Democratic Party led by Martin Schulz is quickly gaining ground (and one new poll from INSA shows the SPD ahead by 1 point).
Since Merkel and Schulz are both critics of Trump, the president’s not likely to be a factor in the race between them. But antipathy toward Trump may help dampen support for the main far-right party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD). The poll shows AfD support at 12 percent, down 3 points from a previous survey.
Germany’s deep regret over its Nazi past has largely inoculated it from the entreaties of right-wing populist parties, Paterson says. Hendrik Trager, a political scientist at the University of Leipzig, agrees, noting that the kind of anti-immigrant populism that Trump represents doesn’t play well with most German voters. “And that,” Trager adds, “could be a problem for the AfD.”
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