“People hate you,” the adviser informed his leader. A think-piece in a daily newspaper noted that “almost everyone agrees on one thing: they don’t like him”.

The recent disastrous set of local election results in the UK built on Keir Starmer’s longstanding reputational problem: only 11% of Britons believe he has been a good or great prime minister, and nearly 60% believe he has been poor or terrible, according to polling by YouGov.

Little wonder that a large number of his colleagues are seeking to drag him out of Downing Street despite being in power for less than two years. But the startlingly frank adviser quoted above was not talking to Starmer but instead to France’s president, Emmanuel Macron. The no-nonsense newspaper article was not about the British prime minister but the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz.

Starmer is unpopular. According to Statista, just 27% approve of him, and 65% do not, with 8% said to be unsure. But the numbers are even more dire for both Merz (19% approve, 76% disapprove and 5% did not know) and Macron (18% approve, 75% disapprove, 7% don’t know).

The three largest economies in Europe are being led by leaders who are regarded by their people with something close to contempt, the polling suggests, but then few incumbents on the continent are bucking this trend.

The Austrian chancellor, Christian Stocker, is widely regarded as being an ineffective leader of his coalition. Jonas Gahr Støre, whose Labour party in Norway has been buffeted by all manner of scandals, has a disapproval rating that is only a marginal improvement on that of Starmer. The same is true of Bart de Wever, the prime minister of Belgium who is leading a coalition that is putting through strict budget cuts, pension reforms, and tax increases as it seeks to fix the country’s public debt.

All have ratings that are worse than Donald Trump (38% approve, 57% disapprove and 6% don’t know), at a time when the polling shows him to be as unpopular as he has ever been. That includes the period in the immediate aftermath of the storming of Congress by his supporters on 6 January 2021. Spain’s Pedro Sánchez and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni fare only a little better than the US president and, for all their faults, they did not start a war in Iran. So what is happening?

In Berlin, where Peter Matuschek, the head of the polling thinktank Forsa, follows the fortunes of the German chancellor, it can sometimes feel that Europe has fallen foul of a spectacularly poor generation of politicians.

Merz was unpopular even before he became chancellor, but his error-strewn pronouncements and empty promises have only worsened his polling numbers, said Matuschek. Most recently the loquacious self-confident chancellor opened up a transatlantic rift by telling a class of schoolchildren that the US was being “humiliated” by Iran’s leadership.

“If you look at the problems that all the other incumbents are confronted with, maybe it’s a lack of politicians able to tackle the problems,” Matuschek said. “In the Covid crisis, at the beginning of 2020, we saw that all the institutions, including the chancellor, the government, parliament, really got up digit points in approval because people saw that although the problem was so overwhelming, they had the impression that something was being done about it. So every crisis contains at least the chance for any leader to grow with the crisis.”

Such a conclusion may be a little hard on Macron, who is coming to the end of his 10 years in power. Since 2022, his capacity to make things happen has been hamstrung by his lack of a majority in the national assembly. But then Macron’s approval numbers are significantly worse than those enjoyed by Jacques Chirac in 2006 at the end of his two terms, and Chirac had been described at the time as “the most unpopular occupant of the Élysée Palace” in the history of the Fifth Republic. But Matuschek’s critique of Merz – broken promises, failure to deliver on reforms and an inability to manage his party – will have the ring of familiarity to it for anyone following the British prime minister’s time in power. Poor judgment and a lack of charisma, or arguably the wrong sort in the case of Merz, is surely part of the problem – but is there not a more structural issue facing the major European powers?

According to World Bank data, Europe’s share of global economic output, measured in current US dollars, fell from roughly 33% to 23% between 2005 and 2024 – a proportion said by the Maddison Project, a database that tracks economic history at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, to be likely the lowest from the continent since the middle ages. The US economy is expected to expand by 2.4% this year. Compare that to France (0.9%), the UK (0.9%) and Germany (0.6%). The Wall Street Journal recently reported that executive assistants in New York City earn around the same as specialist doctors in London.

Strong leadership can make a difference but Fabian Zuleeg, of the European Policy Centre, said that European leaders are facing tough headwinds that any leader would struggle to navigate. They range from Europe’s need to cut itself off from its reliance on cheap Russian fossil fuels after Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine to the rise of China as an economic and manufacturing powerhouse. Indeed, Starmer’s poll numbers are not unheard of in British politics. The personal ratings for Margaret Thatcher, when polled 45 years ago this month during another time of major economic strife, bear a resemblance to that of Starmer’s: 33.5% were satisfied with Thatcher in May 1981 and 60.5% were dissatisfied.

“I think it is also more structural,” said Zuleeg of Europe’s leadership problem. “In Europe, in a sense, the holiday from history is over, which means we have to tell our populations that there are difficult times ahead, that this will have an impact on their daily lives, that this will entail decisions, which are unpopular, because of the global turmoil in which we find ourselves in. I don’t think our leaders have been able to convince populations that the pain which they are feeling is necessary, which means the this has a direct impact on their own popularity.”

Scan across Europe and there are leaders who appear to have bucked the trend, Zuleeg said. After seven years in power, Mette Frederiksen is still in with a shout of staying on as the prime minister of Denmark after an election in which her Social Democrats party was left bloodied but not bowed. Coalition talks are continuing. Frederiksen had cut into the votes of the far right by taking a tough stance on immigration and had navigated the clash with Donald Trump over his claims to Greenland, a Danish territory. “She’s a steady hand,” said Emil Sondaj Hansen from the Europa thinktank in Copenhagen.

But while the cost of living crisis was a major talking point in the recent elections, Denmark has also benefited from long-term energy planning, with 80% of the country’s electricity consumption now sourced from renewable energy, primarily wind power. Denmark’s economy is expected to grow by between 2% and 3% this year. Ultimately, today’s leaders can only do so much to make their mark. They operate in an environment shaped by the failures and successes of their predecessors.