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Poll points to widespread dissatisfaction with CDU/SPD coalition

Three in four Germans are currently slightly or wholly dissatisfied with the work of the federal government, according to a poll published on Wednesday.

Some 46% of participants in the September "Deutschlandtrend" poll, conducted by Infratest dimap for public broadcaster ARD, said they were slightly dissatisfied, while another 29% said they were wholly dissatisfied.

Meanwhile, 21% said they were satisfied and only 1% described themselves as very satisfied with the work of Chancellor Friedrich Merz and his Cabinet.

The rates of disapproval were even more pronounced in former East Germany, where only 11% voiced satisfaction and 40% expressed complete dissatisfaction.

The cooperation between the center right Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and center left Social Democrats (SPD) met with even more disapproval, with 77% of respondents either partly or wholly dissatisfied.

Cabinet members had just as rough a ride in individual approval ratings. All senior politicians weighed in at 35% approval or less, save one, Defense Minister Boris Pistorius (SPD) at 60%. Chancellor Merz scored 33%.

Asked about their voting intentions, if the next federal election were to take place this Sunday, participants offered a snapshot more or less comparable to the last election. Some 27% said they'd vote CDU/CSU, the same share as in August, while the SPD's figure rose by one point to 14%. The populist right-wing AfD climbed to 25%, its best score to date but only one point higher than last month, while the Greens slipped by a point to 11% and the Left Party held steady on 10%.

All the other parties would fail to reach the 5% hurdle to guarantee parliamentary representation, based on the poll's findings.

Yields on long-dated U.K., German and French government bonds rose to multi-year highs as investors weighed the impact of rising debt levels and political instability.

U.K. 30-year government-bond yields hit their highest level since 1998 in morning trading on Tuesday, German 30-year yields reached their highest level since 2011 and French 30-year yields rose to their highest since 2009.

The rise in borrowing costs comes amid concerns that plans for increased defense spending in Europe and infrastructure spending in Germany will cause public debt to rise at a time when the regional economy is weak. As a result, investors are demanding a higher premium to buy long-dated bonds.

Meanwhile, deteriorating public finances in France are causing political fragmentation. Prime Minister Francois Bayrou isn’t expected to survive a confidence vote as he tries to push through the equivalent of $51 billion in budget cuts to curb a deficit that reached 5.8% of GDP last year.

In the U.K., there are additional concerns about high levels of inflation that could prevent the Bank of England from cutting interest rates further in order to stimulate a weak economy.

“We’re seeing a slow-moving vicious circle: rising debt concerns push yields higher, worsening debt dynamics, which in turn push yields higher again,” Deutsche Bank Research analysts said in a note.

Economic risks are emerging in France while political instability looms, as the third government is in danger of falling in little over a year. Further attempts to tackle the country’s enormous debt could be choked until after the next presidential election in 2027.

Political instability is fuelling recession fears in Europe’s second biggest economy, where fragile growth has recently shown surprising resilience despite trade tariffs biting.

But while the economy shows promising signs, France is in urgent need of consolidating its finances, with its deficit amounting to 5.8% of GDP and debt amounting to 113% by the end of 2024.

The necessary belt-tightening is politically controversial, leading to the fall of the government led by Prime Minister Michel Barnier last year.

On 8 September 2025, French Prime Minister François Bayrou could risk a similar fate during a vote of confidence, which he called in an attempt to secure the National Assembly's support for his €44 billion budget savings plan.

The opposition, which constitutes the majority in the parliament, promised to most certainly vote him out, leaving the country to fall into political and economic uncertainty.

The choice of Paris as the venue for a summit of the European “coalition of the willing” to discuss a “reassurance force” for Ukraine this week has turned out to be deeply unfortunate; for five days after the summit, France may well not have a government. Then again, it’s not clear that any other European capital would have made for a better choice.

France has been plunged into a renewed political crisis by the decision of the prime minister, Francois Bayrou, to hold a parliamentary vote of confidence on September 8 over his plans for steep cuts in public spending in order to reduce France’s public debt while greatly increasing its military spending. French trades unions have promised a general strike on September 18 to block these moves.

Unless a deal can be stitched up with the parties of the right and left that have vowed to oppose the budget, Bayrou will be defeated in parliament and forced to resign, and France will enter its third governmental crisis in barely a year.

President Emmanuel Macron will be left with a choice of bad and risky alternatives: choose a new prime minister and try to gain a parliamentary majority by abandoning most of the budget cuts — leaving Macron to struggle on till the next presidential elections in the Spring of 2027 as even more of a lame duck than he is now — or call new parliamentary elections and risk another electoral defeat that might leave him with no realistic option but to resign.

How can a country in this political and fiscal situation be seriously planning a very risky and expensive military deployment far from France’s own borders? Britain, the co-sponsor of the Paris summit and would-be joint leader of any European force for Ukraine, is in only relatively better shape. Unlike Bayrou, Prime Minister Keir Starmer has a large parliamentary majority (though with only one third of the popular vote). Much good it has done him.

He has suffered two humiliating climb-downs over cuts to social welfare in the face of revolts from within his own Labour Party. The last one saw his chancellor of the exchequer, Rachel Reeves, burst into tears in Parliament as her spending plans collapsed. Now Reeves has been virtually sidelined in the last in a series of government reshuffles intended to give a sense of new policies and restore Labour’s crumbling popularity. In the view of the former Financial Times editor Lionel Barber, writing in FT:

“The Chancellor has now ended up in the worst of all possible worlds. Trapped by negative [economic] expectations, tax rises and/or deep spending cuts are deemed inevitable. The first is a confidence killer; the second anathema to the Labour Party…”

According to a new opinion poll, only 27 percent of voters now have a favorable opinion of Labour (and only 24 percent of Starmer), while the right-wing populist Reform Party led by Nigel Farage exceeds both Labour and the Conservatives with 34 percent, largely on the strength of a surge in public concern about illegal migration.

In these circumstances, for Britain to raise the money radically to increase its armed forces would seem impossible. As for the “reassurance force” for Ukraine — as now revealed by the Wall Street Journal — the proposed British contribution is not nearly as large as previously imagined. Rather than the ground troops previously envisaged, it will be “focused on maritime and air domains,” and the combined French and British contingents will be only 6,000 - 10,000 strong.

Previous estimates for the necessary size of a credible European reassurance force were in the region of 50,000-100,000 troops. Where are the rest to come from? So far, only Denmark, Sweden, The Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, and the Baltic States have indicated — in very vague terms — a possible willingness to contribute to a reassurance force; of these, only Sweden and Spain can be considered remotely serious military powers.

Moreover, it is not clear that they even mean that their contribution will include actual troops. The Spanish Defense Ministry has said that the Spanish contribution could consist only of observers and trainers. The Spanish government is facing strong opposition to this plan and to higher military spending from within its own coalition — and Spain opted out of NATO’s commitment to spend five percent of GDP on defense, and its military spending relative to GDP is the lowest of all NATO members.

SEPTEMBER 4, 2025 6:00 AM CET
BY LAURA KAYALIPARIS — France's prime minister is likely to be ousted — again — and political turmoil risks delaying the country's pledge to boost defense spending, amid increasing worry about the Russia threat and Donald Trump's commitment to European security.

If French lawmakers topple François Bayrou on Monday as expected, the overall direction of higher military spending will be slowed, but it's not likely to be scrapped.

However, the country's focus on its domestic troubles comes in sharp contrast with French President Emmanuel Macron's push for leadership on the global stage. On Thursday, he co-chairs alongside U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer a meeting of the so-called coalition of the willing, a group of countries working on security guarantees for Ukraine in case of a ceasefire with Russia.

"There is a huge gap between the international context, which is still very bad with the war in Ukraine, and the internal French situation which seems disconnected from these issues," said Guillaume Lagane, an expert on defense policy and a teacher at the Sciences Po public research university.

"There is a strategic signaling problem; we are not conveying the right message to our adversaries and allies," he stressed, adding: "Our allies are moving forward [with their military buildup], and we're not."

If Bayrou is voted out next week, it'll be the second time in less than a year that a French prime minister is toppled by the National Assembly, after Michel Barnier's fall in December.

"Once again, there is uncertainty," conceded French Armed Forces Minister Sébastien Lecornu last week when asked about the impact of Monday's vote on the country's military ramp-up. Lecornu is one of the front-runners to replace Bayrou should he be ousted.

New military planning law

In July, Macron promised that France would boost defense spending to €64 billion in 2027. His pledge came a few weeks after NATO allies committed to boost defense spending to 5 percent of gross domestic product, including 3.5 percent of GDP for purely military expenditures. That's a sharp increase compared with the previous 2 percent target.

The French president said the government would present to parliament in the fall an update of the seven-year military planning law to earmark the spending increases. That bill, which is not ready yet, is bound to be postponed if France has to change government or even go through another snap election — an option that remains on the table.

"The defense budget increases announced by President Macron ... [and] welcomed by a majority of the political class, remain dependent on a vote in parliament: they are therefore now uncertain," said Bertrand de Cordoue, an adviser on defense and armament at the Jacques Delors Institute.

There is broad agreement across France's political spectrum that the country's defense expenditure should increase and a change in prime minister is not likely to threaten that. According to Hélène Conway-Mouret, a Socialist senator who sits on the defense and foreign affairs committee, "no one will dare touch the [defense spending] commitments that have been made, because they are existential."

However, parliament, industry and military officials warned in conversations with POLITICO that precious time will inevitably be wasted. Defense companies will also be more reluctant to invest or make long-term plans before the political crisis is resolved, they said.

This week, Lecornu embarked on a France-wide tour to visit defense companies despite the political crisis, in a bid to show that prep work for the updated military planning law continues regardless.

But in French defense circles, there's an awkward feeling of déjà vu. "Here we go again," sighed a defense industry official, speaking on condition of being granted anonymity, summing up the mood among French arms-makers.

The fall of Barnier's government ultimately led to months of delays in orders and payments for military equipment. "The military has not forgotten that the Barnier government's censorship messed up some of the weapons programs," said a parliament official.

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Macron's weakened centrist bloc scrambles to survive ahead of confidence vote

With the Assemblée Nationale slated to hold a confidence vote that could topple the government next Monday, French President Emmanuel Macron is calling for unity among his ranks. Prime Minister François Bayrou's lack of clear direction has deepened rifts among the various parties within the governing coalition.​​

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Emmanuel Macron's message was clear and his tone was combative. The goal was to ward off the deadlock threatening the government. At the weekly cabinet meeting on Wednesday, September 3, the French president called on members of the government and their supporters to "mobilize" and "explain" ahead of the confidence vote on Monday, September 8, which could bring down Prime Minister François Bayrou.



Read more Subscribers only Macron turns to Socialists to resolve political crisis

After going months without summoning the leaders of the centrist bloc, Macron gathered Edouard Philippe of center-right Horizons, Gabriel Attal of Macron's Renaissance party and Bayrou himself of the centrist MoDem party to the presidential palace for an impromptu lunch on Tuesday. He hammered home the need for unity in the face of the political and budgetary crisis threatening France and urged them to seek solutions in partnership with the Socialists. For the first time, he also included Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau, president of right-wing Les Républicains (LR), with whom Macron's camp formed a government alliance a year ago.