In this, the 70-year-old chancellor is not endearing himself to German voters, who traditionally like their politicians to be affable but not overly slick. Worse, Merz’s overconfidence has a tendency to backfire. He sometimes loses his audience in explanatory detours and his command of the facts is less sure-footed than his delivery suggests. In a recent wide-ranging interview on one of Germany’s leading political podcasts, Machtwechsel, Merz delivered a flurry of inaccurate or contradictory-sounding statements. Listeners could not help but experience a sense of “Fremdschämen” – a German word that might best be expressed as cringe.