What’s the overall verdict on your country’s prime minister/President/Chancellor?
August 22, 2025
Do people in your country like their leader?
23 comments
Some don’t even know who it is lol – but the opinion is okay. Not crazy positive nor negative,, maybe currenly a bit less positive due to the trump mess.
Not very much. Many people say they don’t really do much. They promised to set a trial on corrupted members of the former ruling party. Effects were poor. They also continue many policies from the former right-wing government that they pledged to abolish.
Also, they promised pro abortion and pro LGBT reforms. This year we had presidential elections. Their candidate avoided questions about LGBT and other progressive topics, he tried to please the right-wing voters.
Macron is an arrogant banker, fucks up our budget and gives it all to the wealthiest 1%. His current prime minister is an opportunistic old fool, who has less charisma than a trash can.
Dick Schoof has been a puppet of Geert Wilders and the other party leaders of the coalition. Great contender for worst postwar prime minister.
Our new Chancellor Friedrich Merz is only in office since a bit more than 100 days.
I’d say there is somewhat of a consensus that in terms of foreign relations and international affairs he’s doing quite well, especially compared to his predecessor Olaf Scholz who was a bit of an embarrassment.
But in terms of domestic policy there is a lot of disagreement in his coalition and major issues remain unsolved and it looks questionable whether the government really has the will to implement necessary reforms.
Stubb is an asshole, but his slimy and opportunistic character is really working in his favour as president. He knows how to suck up to Trump but is also good with media appearances etc. He’s an articulate show pony you can gladly send out to represent us. He’s done a good job in putting Finland to tables we wouldn’t otherwise be in.
Orpo on the other hand is a disastrous PM. You couldn’t find a more spineless politician if you tried. I believe he is smart and all that, but he’s just a godawful PM. He’s in the habit of avoiding the media because he just can’t convincingly defend the politics of his government. He has the charisma of a wet mitten.
Micheal Martin is Irish Taoiseach (prime minister) and is quite popular with an approval rating of about 46% in a recent opinion poll. He is more popular than other party leaders even though he has been Taoiseach on and off since 2020.
He seems quite an affable person which I guess helps, and he has had tragedy in his personal life so there is sympathy for him. The opposition is divided, and unpopular in opinion polls, so I guess it helps that there isn’t an obvious alternative.
Jonas Gahr Støre.
Norway is having an election on the 8th of September. Støre is the most popular candidate for PM, but the right is close to winning the election nevertheless.
Støre will never have the gravitas of Jens Stoltenberg. He was not the PM during the terror attack at Utøya, but he has extensive experience with foreign policy.
I think overall he’s a decent bloke, if sometimes a bit too intellectual. The right in Norway call him the Lord of Fog, due to his sometimes less than clear simplistic arguments.
Giorgia Meloni has a current approval rating of 40-45%, depending from the polls.
Her party has been polling around 28-30% for quite a long time and would still be the first party if elections were held today.
As an austrian:
Our chancellor is not really that well liked, for once because he is like the 5th in the last 5 years but also because his party kind of promised that they would not do coalition talks with the far right and then proceeded to do them anyways (the guy who was head of the party at the time resigned shortly before so our current chancellor was not even voted for).
Our president however is almost universally loved (except by the far right, I know, shocking). As he has brought us through all the crises which happened in the past few years relatively smoothly and made good decisions to bring our country forward (as far as his limited power allows him to). For instance when (I think) for the first time in history none of the parties managed to form a coalition and he managed to keep everything cool for the few turbulent weeks until a compromise was found. Just a few years ago he also set up an “expert government” in respone to a governmental collapse.
The President, Alexander Stubb, has been in office for more than a year and is generally rather well received. On a Finnish school grade scale from 4 (fail) to 10 (excellent), polls place him at 8. An average score would be 7. No party, not even those from left-wing parties, grade him below 7.
Prime Minister Petteri Orpo and his government is way less popular. If elections were held now, his party would lose the top spot and his coalition would crumble due to bad results from other parties in the government coalition as well.
The prime minister is the only person thoroughly impressed with himself. Most people think he sucks, he has an astounding talent to be completely out of touch. He’ll lose the elections in a few weeks. And it will get worse with our next prime minister.
Our president is much more popular.
France here.
I really dislike our president, he keeps appointing people who keep destroying the normal functioning of our institutions, who fucked up out budget and then blamed everyone else even though they were the ones in power for years, and he played so much with fire (the far right) to gain votes that he essentially legitimated them as a normal party to have and now they’re the largest single party of the country but they don’t even need to be elected for their ideas to be voted because the government is doing it themselves in their 5D chess game to beat them to the punch. He seems to be unable to reflect on his actions and he’s never wrong about anything ever, no matter what happens. Also the way he speaks is really annoying, it sounds like he thinks he’s speaking to children. Even when he’s speaking about something you tell him, he talks like he’s teaching you a lesson about it.
Regardless of what you think about his politics, this man is really annoying.
And somehow, in barely a few months, our current prime minister managed to be even worse than the president has been in 8 years. He even managed to sound even more condescending than Macron, except with Macron it sounds like an annoying rhetorical quirk, with Bayrou it just sounds like he’s an absolute dick. I won’t enter into too much details, but he’s embroiled in a scandal about protecting a catholic school where children were physically and sexually abused for decades, and his defence is basically pleading absolute incompetence (+attacking the whistleblower), and yet he doesn’t see any problem with being the person with the most responsibility in the country right now. Also he doesn’t know how many stars there are in our solar system.
The PM Rosen Zhelyazkov is your typical figurehead or a puppet, so nobody cares about him.
Boyko Borisov and Delyan Peevski are the ones ruling the country, which has been the case for almost 20 years.
Some people are really disgusted by them, worried about ever growing corruption and steadily moving towards a soft dictatorship. Others think Borisov and his party are still the best option and cite economic growth, infrastructural development etc.. Most people don’t really care about what goes on. Being apolitical is the norm in Eastern Europe.
The president Rumen Radev is more interesting. We’ve never had such an active presidential figure. A lot of people view him as a Russian agent trying to destabilise the country and steer it away from it’s European course of development. Others think he is a true patriot defending the average person’s interests. And many think he is a typical populist saying things that will help him out in his future political career. I think he is still the most popular political leader in Bulgaria at the moment although I can’t stand him anymore.
Temporary prime minister hated for tax reform he did as finance minister in the current government. Last prime minister hated for corruption scandal and had to resign. People like president.
PM was accused of possible corruption, chose to call early elections instead of being investigated, won again. We get what we deserve.
The President has a less annoying voice and chills on the beach with the people
He’s widely acknowledged as being wishy-washy on several issues and not really having a strong personality or ability to put his points forward. His approval rating fluctuates up and down all the time: it went up earlier this year when he hosted Zelensky at Downing Street (and this was about a week after the infamous White House argument with Trump and Vance), but has gone down by a lot since then.
I think the overall verdict is probably “not the best, but still an improvement over Truss”.
I like Bart De Wever. He’s upfront about his plans, knows it will make him unpopular but eloquiently explains why it is needed and uses the data to back him up. He isn’t flashy, built his party from the ground up to be the largest in Flanders, and does his best to work with Wallonia.
I’m biased ofc since I voted for him but I think he’s doing a good job in a hard time for the country.
Social Democrats have lost a huge chunk of their popularity and are looking towards their worst election in their entire history, here in 3 months, when the municipality elections happen. This is all due to our controversial leader Mette Frederiksen, who’s loved by some and hated by others. She’s actually one of the most controversial leaders we’ve ever had, partly due to covid and partly due to recent years. In general I can’t say much for a few more months about how loved or hated she and her party still is, as the soon to be local election will tell us the true data, we can expect for 2026. But know the population is split between national politics and outside national politics, when it comes to whether you like her or not.
Those who were raised on modern political philosophy hate him.
Those who read Machiavelli understand him.
In certain circles he may even be a loved cult figure.
But to be fair the two radical hatred / love groups mostly balance out each other, so the average is somewhere around neutral.
The old prime minister resigned recently due to corruption scandal. Previously he was regarded as the future of the social democrat party. Turns out he used his position as well as previous positions for the benefit of his own private companies and those of his family. This included some fake use of EU funding. Several journalists started uncovering scandal after scandal in the last few months. Finally resigned when financial crimes unit did a search in his brother’s home. I think his political career may be mostly over, although he remains MP.
The new prime minister is a rather attractive lady who has shared her photo with kawaii filter on social media. Very little political experience, some experience with trade unions, but also quite limited. Her biggest advantage is apparently that she had the lowest potential that the journalists would dig up some corruption. Three other more competent candidates strategically decided not to go because of some potential issues, even if some of them are quite small. Some of them are young and may have chances of becoming PM or President in the future, so they don’t want the hot seat right now. What we have come to.
French people are consistently unhappy with their leadership six months after the elections so it is what it is.
I’m not sure about Prime Minister Orpo’s personal approval ratings, but his government has a [38.8%](https://yle.fi/a/74-20175926) approval rating, which is bad. As for the president, he got a [7.98](https://yle.fi/a/74-20143350) on a 4-10 scale (common school grades here) in February, which is good.
President Alexander Stubb has exceeded my expectations. He is a leading voice on foreign policy, has strong ties with international leaders, goes golfing with Trump, participates in important international negotiations (it’s thanks to him that *Finland* was at the table at the recent Ukraine meeting in the White House), appears regularly on major international news outlets, extremely media-savvy, fluent in five languages… My main complaint is that he is a bit too casual sometimes. There are situations that call for a “Mr President of the Republic” and not an “Alex”.
23 comments
Some don’t even know who it is lol – but the opinion is okay. Not crazy positive nor negative,, maybe currenly a bit less positive due to the trump mess.
Not very much. Many people say they don’t really do much. They promised to set a trial on corrupted members of the former ruling party. Effects were poor. They also continue many policies from the former right-wing government that they pledged to abolish.
Also, they promised pro abortion and pro LGBT reforms. This year we had presidential elections. Their candidate avoided questions about LGBT and other progressive topics, he tried to please the right-wing voters.
Macron is an arrogant banker, fucks up our budget and gives it all to the wealthiest 1%. His current prime minister is an opportunistic old fool, who has less charisma than a trash can.
Dick Schoof has been a puppet of Geert Wilders and the other party leaders of the coalition. Great contender for worst postwar prime minister.
Our new Chancellor Friedrich Merz is only in office since a bit more than 100 days.
I’d say there is somewhat of a consensus that in terms of foreign relations and international affairs he’s doing quite well, especially compared to his predecessor Olaf Scholz who was a bit of an embarrassment.
But in terms of domestic policy there is a lot of disagreement in his coalition and major issues remain unsolved and it looks questionable whether the government really has the will to implement necessary reforms.
Stubb is an asshole, but his slimy and opportunistic character is really working in his favour as president. He knows how to suck up to Trump but is also good with media appearances etc. He’s an articulate show pony you can gladly send out to represent us. He’s done a good job in putting Finland to tables we wouldn’t otherwise be in.
Orpo on the other hand is a disastrous PM. You couldn’t find a more spineless politician if you tried. I believe he is smart and all that, but he’s just a godawful PM. He’s in the habit of avoiding the media because he just can’t convincingly defend the politics of his government. He has the charisma of a wet mitten.
Micheal Martin is Irish Taoiseach (prime minister) and is quite popular with an approval rating of about 46% in a recent opinion poll. He is more popular than other party leaders even though he has been Taoiseach on and off since 2020.
He seems quite an affable person which I guess helps, and he has had tragedy in his personal life so there is sympathy for him. The opposition is divided, and unpopular in opinion polls, so I guess it helps that there isn’t an obvious alternative.
Jonas Gahr Støre.
Norway is having an election on the 8th of September. Støre is the most popular candidate for PM, but the right is close to winning the election nevertheless.
Støre will never have the gravitas of Jens Stoltenberg. He was not the PM during the terror attack at Utøya, but he has extensive experience with foreign policy.
I think overall he’s a decent bloke, if sometimes a bit too intellectual. The right in Norway call him the Lord of Fog, due to his sometimes less than clear simplistic arguments.
Giorgia Meloni has a current approval rating of 40-45%, depending from the polls.
Her party has been polling around 28-30% for quite a long time and would still be the first party if elections were held today.
As an austrian:
Our chancellor is not really that well liked, for once because he is like the 5th in the last 5 years but also because his party kind of promised that they would not do coalition talks with the far right and then proceeded to do them anyways (the guy who was head of the party at the time resigned shortly before so our current chancellor was not even voted for).
Our president however is almost universally loved (except by the far right, I know, shocking). As he has brought us through all the crises which happened in the past few years relatively smoothly and made good decisions to bring our country forward (as far as his limited power allows him to). For instance when (I think) for the first time in history none of the parties managed to form a coalition and he managed to keep everything cool for the few turbulent weeks until a compromise was found. Just a few years ago he also set up an “expert government” in respone to a governmental collapse.
The President, Alexander Stubb, has been in office for more than a year and is generally rather well received. On a Finnish school grade scale from 4 (fail) to 10 (excellent), polls place him at 8. An average score would be 7. No party, not even those from left-wing parties, grade him below 7.
Prime Minister Petteri Orpo and his government is way less popular. If elections were held now, his party would lose the top spot and his coalition would crumble due to bad results from other parties in the government coalition as well.
The prime minister is the only person thoroughly impressed with himself. Most people think he sucks, he has an astounding talent to be completely out of touch. He’ll lose the elections in a few weeks. And it will get worse with our next prime minister.
Our president is much more popular.
France here.
I really dislike our president, he keeps appointing people who keep destroying the normal functioning of our institutions, who fucked up out budget and then blamed everyone else even though they were the ones in power for years, and he played so much with fire (the far right) to gain votes that he essentially legitimated them as a normal party to have and now they’re the largest single party of the country but they don’t even need to be elected for their ideas to be voted because the government is doing it themselves in their 5D chess game to beat them to the punch. He seems to be unable to reflect on his actions and he’s never wrong about anything ever, no matter what happens. Also the way he speaks is really annoying, it sounds like he thinks he’s speaking to children. Even when he’s speaking about something you tell him, he talks like he’s teaching you a lesson about it.
Regardless of what you think about his politics, this man is really annoying.
And somehow, in barely a few months, our current prime minister managed to be even worse than the president has been in 8 years. He even managed to sound even more condescending than Macron, except with Macron it sounds like an annoying rhetorical quirk, with Bayrou it just sounds like he’s an absolute dick. I won’t enter into too much details, but he’s embroiled in a scandal about protecting a catholic school where children were physically and sexually abused for decades, and his defence is basically pleading absolute incompetence (+attacking the whistleblower), and yet he doesn’t see any problem with being the person with the most responsibility in the country right now. Also he doesn’t know how many stars there are in our solar system.
The PM Rosen Zhelyazkov is your typical figurehead or a puppet, so nobody cares about him.
Boyko Borisov and Delyan Peevski are the ones ruling the country, which has been the case for almost 20 years.
Some people are really disgusted by them, worried about ever growing corruption and steadily moving towards a soft dictatorship. Others think Borisov and his party are still the best option and cite economic growth, infrastructural development etc.. Most people don’t really care about what goes on. Being apolitical is the norm in Eastern Europe.
The president Rumen Radev is more interesting. We’ve never had such an active presidential figure. A lot of people view him as a Russian agent trying to destabilise the country and steer it away from it’s European course of development. Others think he is a true patriot defending the average person’s interests. And many think he is a typical populist saying things that will help him out in his future political career. I think he is still the most popular political leader in Bulgaria at the moment although I can’t stand him anymore.
Temporary prime minister hated for tax reform he did as finance minister in the current government. Last prime minister hated for corruption scandal and had to resign. People like president.
PM was accused of possible corruption, chose to call early elections instead of being investigated, won again. We get what we deserve.
The President has a less annoying voice and chills on the beach with the people
He’s widely acknowledged as being wishy-washy on several issues and not really having a strong personality or ability to put his points forward. His approval rating fluctuates up and down all the time: it went up earlier this year when he hosted Zelensky at Downing Street (and this was about a week after the infamous White House argument with Trump and Vance), but has gone down by a lot since then.
I think the overall verdict is probably “not the best, but still an improvement over Truss”.
I like Bart De Wever. He’s upfront about his plans, knows it will make him unpopular but eloquiently explains why it is needed and uses the data to back him up. He isn’t flashy, built his party from the ground up to be the largest in Flanders, and does his best to work with Wallonia.
I’m biased ofc since I voted for him but I think he’s doing a good job in a hard time for the country.
Social Democrats have lost a huge chunk of their popularity and are looking towards their worst election in their entire history, here in 3 months, when the municipality elections happen. This is all due to our controversial leader Mette Frederiksen, who’s loved by some and hated by others. She’s actually one of the most controversial leaders we’ve ever had, partly due to covid and partly due to recent years. In general I can’t say much for a few more months about how loved or hated she and her party still is, as the soon to be local election will tell us the true data, we can expect for 2026. But know the population is split between national politics and outside national politics, when it comes to whether you like her or not.
Those who were raised on modern political philosophy hate him.
Those who read Machiavelli understand him.
In certain circles he may even be a loved cult figure.
But to be fair the two radical hatred / love groups mostly balance out each other, so the average is somewhere around neutral.
The old prime minister resigned recently due to corruption scandal. Previously he was regarded as the future of the social democrat party. Turns out he used his position as well as previous positions for the benefit of his own private companies and those of his family. This included some fake use of EU funding. Several journalists started uncovering scandal after scandal in the last few months. Finally resigned when financial crimes unit did a search in his brother’s home. I think his political career may be mostly over, although he remains MP.
The new prime minister is a rather attractive lady who has shared her photo with kawaii filter on social media. Very little political experience, some experience with trade unions, but also quite limited. Her biggest advantage is apparently that she had the lowest potential that the journalists would dig up some corruption. Three other more competent candidates strategically decided not to go because of some potential issues, even if some of them are quite small. Some of them are young and may have chances of becoming PM or President in the future, so they don’t want the hot seat right now. What we have come to.
French people are consistently unhappy with their leadership six months after the elections so it is what it is.
I’m not sure about Prime Minister Orpo’s personal approval ratings, but his government has a [38.8%](https://yle.fi/a/74-20175926) approval rating, which is bad. As for the president, he got a [7.98](https://yle.fi/a/74-20143350) on a 4-10 scale (common school grades here) in February, which is good.
President Alexander Stubb has exceeded my expectations. He is a leading voice on foreign policy, has strong ties with international leaders, goes golfing with Trump, participates in important international negotiations (it’s thanks to him that *Finland* was at the table at the recent Ukraine meeting in the White House), appears regularly on major international news outlets, extremely media-savvy, fluent in five languages… My main complaint is that he is a bit too casual sometimes. There are situations that call for a “Mr President of the Republic” and not an “Alex”.