Merging Pandas DF with a Geopandas Shapefile removes all the rows except column names

Question

I am trying to merge a pandas DataFrame df with a GeoPandas shapefile gdf. Whenever I try to merge the two together, the output for gdf.head() only shows the column names and no rows of data under it.

Here is the code:

import pandas as pd
import geopandas as gpd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

df = pd.read_csv('~/Desktop/sds cw/cars.csv')
shape = gpd.read_file('~/Desktop/sds cw/Europe_SWAsia.shp')
shape.rename(columns = {'NAME' : 'Country'}, inplace = True)
gdf = gpd.GeoDataFrame(df.merge(shape, on = 'Country'))
gdf.head()

The output is:

I have merged Pandas with shapefiles before and this has never happened so I am a bit confused as to why. Maybe it has something to do with the actual .csv?

Any solutions would be greatly appreciated.