ZWICKAU, Germany — Volkswagen’s state-of-the-art plant in this tidy eastern German city once symbolized the country’s bright manufacturing future.
Now, it’s fertile territory for Germany’s rising far right, which sees in the plant’s myriad troubles — and rising fury among its workers facing job cuts — abundant political opportunity.
“We want Volkswagen to pursue a policy that is actually market-oriented and not a planned economy,” said Lars Bochmann, a local politician in the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party who sits on the plant’s works council. “We experienced that here when it was East Germany,” he added, referring to the central planning of the former communist state.
Bochmann has worked at the Zwickau plant for nearly three decades, most recently in quality control, before being elected by workers to represent them in 2022. In that time, VW has gone from a symbol of German manufacturing might to one embodiment of the country’s economic malaise.
In December, VW announced a deal with union representatives to cut 35,000 jobs over the next five years to stave off considerably more painful measures. Earlier in the year, VW had threatened to close factories in Germany for the first time in the company’s long history, which stretches back to the Nazi era.
Bochmann is in the vanguard of a concerted AfD effort to seize on growing dissatisfaction among workers at VW, and also in the automobile sector and German commerce more broadly. The party’s vehicle for this is a far-right organization called Zentrum, or Center, which describes itself as an “alternative labor movement.” Zentrum’s goal is to compete for the allegiance of workers in prominent trade unions like IG Metall and Ver.di, which have deep links to the center-left Social Democratic Party, long the party of German labor.
Should the AfD make big inroads with traditionally left-wing union voters, their thinking goes, political power will follow, or as Bochmann put it: “We are fighting in local politics, but also while on the job.”
The plant in Zwickau was VW’s first to only produce electric vehicles, representing the carmaker’s effort to transition away from the combustion engine and compete with United States and Chinese brands for the future of the automobile. But Bochmann and his Zentrum colleagues blame precisely this move — VW’s focus on electric vehicles and government subsidies to encourage their production — for the company’s decline.
Ahead of a national election on Feb. 23 in which the AfD is expected to take a strong second place, Bochmann’s anti-Green, pro-combustion-engine message comes directly out of the party’s election manifesto. It’s also a message that is resonating with many of the plant’s workers, particularly in a part of the country that counts as one of the AfD’s strongholds.
As workers across Germany become increasingly unnerved by mass industrial layoffs, a two-year economic contraction wrought by high energy costs and drop in global demand for its exports, Bochmann sees a golden opportunity for Zentrum to spread the message.
“In the past, workers only spoke to us behind closed doors, but now they openly approach us,” he said, dining on sausage and taking furtive puffs from his vape in a restaurant on Zwickau’s central square. “We are on a path and hope that this will eventually bear fruit politically, so that we can leave this vale of tears again.”
The wheels come off
It was a moment of celebration and a source of pride when German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier visited the Zwickau plant in the summer of 2023 to cement its status as a great hope for the country’s economy. This is “a city that reflects the major developments in automotive engineering like no other place in Germany,” he told workers. “I have great respect for all those who are helping to restructure our economy.”
Things haven’t worked out as hoped. Two thousand fixed-term posts were cut at the Zwickau plant last year. Output is to be halved from 2027 as part of a major restructuring announced by Volkswagen as it tries to get a grip on its deteriorating finances. Production of four of six electric vehicle models made at the plant is to be relocated to two other German VW factories.
The plant’s troubles have a variety of causes — including flagging growth in electric vehicle sales and increased competition from China. Amid a budget crisis at the end of 2023, the German government cut an electric vehicle subsidy program, further undermining demand.
Even those workers who don’t believe Zentrum provides an answer to their problems are sorely disappointed.
“It feels like a personal defeat,” said Carsten Friedrich, the head of assembly at the plant,” as he strolled past workers and robots — which employees refer to as “Robbies” — assembling ID.3s, the company’s first mass-market electric car. “This is one of the deepest negative cuts I’ve experienced in 30 years of professional life at VW.”
Marc Stephan, the factory’s head of production, who zipped around the plant in an electric car, shared the sentiment.
“People were told we represent the future, and now the next thing we know, production is cut in half,” he said. “That’s hard for our people and creates dissatisfaction and, of course, openness to the populist spectrum.”
Across the country, workers are already increasingly drawn to the AfD. The party finished first among self-identified laborers in Germany during the European Parliament election last summer — a jump of 23 percentage points from a decade earlier — according to one poll. In that same election, the AfD outperformed among labor union members, getting 18.5 percent of their votes compared to 15.9 percent for the general public, according to the German Confederation of Trade Unions, or DGB.
The AfD sees an opportunity to strip away more of those union members, particularly in Germany’s troubled automobile sector.
“Zentrum does not have a large number of works council members overall, but it has focused on key companies,” said Klaus Dörre, a sociology professor at the University of Jena, who has studied the organization. “They have deliberately selected the automotive industry because it is the heart of organized labor relations. Their main argument is that works councils in big car companies are part of the globalist elites and are, so to speak, pursuing globalization against the interests of the German people and the German workers.”
‘Political hegemony’
For a time, Zentrum was too extreme even for the AfD.
The organization was founded in 2009 by Oliver Hilburger, a worker at a Mercedes plant in the southwestern city of Stuttgart with links to Germany’s extreme-right scene, including as a member of a skinhead band that performed, among other songs, an ode to Rudolf Hess, Adolf Hitler’s deputy as Nazi party leader. In a 2022 documentary film, Hilburger attributed his involvement in the band to the “allure of the forbidden.”
Hilburger has in the past called accusations of extremism part of a “smear campaign” by IG Metall and “its dirty allies in the media and politics.”
Originally, the AfD put Zentrum on an “incompatibility list” of organizations too extreme to work with. But as the AfD’s extreme-right flank grew in influence, the party reconsidered. Björn Höcke, the head of the AfD in the state of Thuringia and one of the party’s most extreme leaders, defended Zentrum during a speech at a 2022 party conference.
“Political hegemony is based on cultural hegemony, and we will never achieve cultural hegemony via the parliamentary route alone,” he said. Cultural hegemony, he went on, meant saying “yes” to Zentrum and other “citizens’ movements.”
“We need this foundation,” he added. “Without it, we are nothing and will not break through.” After that, party members voted to remove Zentrum from their incompatibility list, leading to growing cooperation.
Since then, the organization has steadily grown, expanding into other sectors including gastronomy and health care. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Zentrum actively recruited among hospital workers skeptical of vaccine mandates for health care professionals, according to a report in Die Zeit.
The AfD isn’t the first far-right party to push for the working class vote. In France, far-right leader Marine Le Pen has won over many workers who formerly supported far-left parties by coopting economic policies of the left. The AfD, by contrast, is calling for deregulation and tax cuts, and the restoration of energy sources like cheap Russian gas.
“Everything that is energy-intensive — aluminum, steel, fertilizers, cement — is going down the drain, because these dunderheads in Berlin have simply put ideology before reality,” said Matthias Moosdorf, an AfD parliamentarian from the city of Zwickau. “It’s not just a political mistake, it’s a crime against the German people.”
Other unions actively warn employees to resist Zentrum, arguing that the organization doesn’t truly have their interests in mind. In fact, because Zentrum isn’t an official trade union under German law, it’s not allowed to negotiate wage agreements.
“The common thread running through Zentrum’s policy is that the main enemy is always IG Metall and not the capital side,” said Lukas Hezel, who works for DGB and is responsible for educating union members about Zentrum. “It really hardly ever happens that they enter into any kind of conflict with management or take a stand against the management.”
Despite such criticism, Zentrum has been able to expand its presence. In a works council election in January at the VW Zwickau plant, for instance, an “alternative list” headed by Bochmann doubled its presence on the works council from two to four members, a small victory in its campaign to chip away at the dominance of IG Metall.
‘They killed Germany’
It’s no surprise that Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s SPD chose the central German city of Wolfsburg for the party’s official election campaign kickoff event. The city is home to VW’s headquarters and largest car-manufacturing plant in the world, with its four towering smokestacks looming over the city like cathedral spires. It remains one of the SPD’s dwindling heartlands, thanks, in no small part, to the dominance of left-leaning trade unions among the plant’s 70,000 workers.
When Scholz strode onto a stage for the campaign event not far from the VW plant on a dreary January day, the crowd greeted him with polite applause. He then took credit for steering the German economy through troubled times, with a war in Ukraine driving up energy costs. Without SPD leadership, he argued, things would have been far worse.
“When everyone thought that a 10-year economic crisis was coming to Germany, that factories would be shut down forever,” he said. “We made sure that it didn’t turn out that way.”
That evening, Daniela Cavallo, VW’s labor chief and a member of IG Metall, who was at the center of the negotiations between the carmaker and the union to reach the restructuring deal that warded off plant closures, praised the chancellor and his party.
“I would particularly like to emphasize that SPD politicians provided the greatest support by far,” she said. “Here I include, quite clearly, Olaf Scholz, who contacted me personally several times to accompany me during this time … I would never have dreamed before that so much support would really come.”
But for Cavallo and Scholz, there may be little cause for celebration as planned job cuts at VW take effect over the next years. The SPD is already polling a distant third nationally. With no end in sight to Germany’s economic troubles, VW’s deal with unions to avoid plant closures in the country may only prove to be a temporary reprieve.
Outside the event hall where center-left politicians and trade union members praised one another, there were signs that, even in this bastion of the SPD and traditional unions, the fortress walls are crumbling.
At a bar across the street from the entrance to the VW factory one afternoon, a grizzled metalworker who works at the plant sipped coffee and took drags from his cigarette. The man, who only gave his name as Andreas P. out of fear of blowback from his employer, said he was a member of IG Metall and longtime SPD voter.
But now, he said, the party and the government under Scholz had abandoned the workers by going “green, green, green,” sacrificing growth in the process. As a consequence, he said he would vote for the AfD on Feb. 23.
“They killed Germany,” he said of Scholz and his SPD-led government.
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