Photographs of world leaders are unusually bad at showing who is actually taller. Summit stages, podiums, camera positions and footwear change from event to event, so this comparison puts 12 current leaders on the same baseline.
Friedrich Merz is the tallest in this group at 198 cm. Donald Trump follows at about 190 cm, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is 185 cm and Xi Jinping is 180 cm. Andy Burnham is 177 cm, Mark Carney 175 cm and Emmanuel Macron 173 cm.
At the shorter end, Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi and Kim Jong Un are all around 170 cm. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is 168 cm and Volodymyr Zelenskyy is 167 cm. That produces a spread of roughly 31 cm from the tallest to shortest leaders in the lineup.
The comparison is deliberately literal: same baseline, same scale, no podiums and no camera perspective. Height does not tell us anything about political power or leadership quality, but putting these twelve figures on a consistent scale makes familiar summit photographs much easier to read.