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German business groups have warned of “economic catastrophe” should the Alternative for Germany win elections in the east of the country on Sunday, as polls suggest the far-right party is on course for a historic victory.
Voters in the two eastern states of Thuringia and Saxony will elect new regional parliaments on September 1 in elections that could prove disastrous for the deeply unpopular parties in chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition of Social Democrats, Greens and liberals.
Polls suggest the AfD could come first in both polls — a prospect that is alarming local businesses. They fear the party’s xenophobic rhetoric will put off the foreign workers both states desperately need to make up for the region’s steep demographic decline.
“To be clear: with these elections, Thuringia and Saxony stand on the brink of an economic catastrophe,” wrote German Family Business Association president Marie-Christine Ostermann in an op-ed in Thursday’s Handelsblatt.
Business lobby groups have long warned of the dangers posed to Germany’s economic model by the ethno-nationalist, Eurosceptic and pro-Russian AfD.
But their fears escalated after a speech on Saturday by the AfD’s leader in Thuringia, Björn Höcke, one of the party’s most radical ideologues.
Speaking at a rally in the Thuringian town of Sömmerda, Höcke made fun of a campaign launched by “Mittelstand” small- and medium-sized enterprises to protest against the anti-foreigner messaging of the AfD entitled “Made in Germany, made by Vielfalt (diversity)”.
Companies, he said, should “just shut their traps when it comes to politics”. “I hope these companies encounter very, very serious economic difficulties,” he went on.
Höcke described the campaign as “pure hypocrisy”, saying none of the companies involved had operations in Thuringia, and many had plants in other countries such as France. He said he had recently bought a chainsaw made by the company Stihl, but would not do so again because it had moved some of its operations to Switzerland. Stihl has denied this.
Colette Boos-John, head of Thuringia’s family businesses association, said Höcke had “dropped his mask” and shown how his party planned to deal with opinions he did not like.
“He wants to destroy the livelihood of family businesses with his curses,” she said. “But it’s obvious how anti-business the AfD is: because if companies get into difficulties, it’s always the workers on the ground who suffer the most.”
Ostermann pointed to the negative demographic trends that were threatening the regional economy, with Thuringia due to lose 385,000 of its 1mn-strong workforce in the next 10 years. “The danger is that one in four jobs can no longer be filled,” she said.
The situation was equally alarming in Saxony, where one in five people are due to retire by 2033, creating 366,000 vacancies in the workforce.
“Without controlled immigration . . . Thuringia and Saxony can soon switch off the light,” Ostermann said. “Without immigrants, care homes, hospitals and restaurants will have to restrict their operations even more than they are doing already.”
The AfD, whose Thuringian and Saxon branches have been designated “rightwing extremist” by German domestic intelligence, is unlikely to actually come to power in Germany, because no other party will work with it.
But its strength in east Germany, long considered the party’s stronghold, has for some time troubled German politicians and business leaders. It is currently polling at about 32 per cent in Saxony and 30 per cent in Thuringia.
Bertelsmann chief executive Thomas Rabe has said people who vote AfD were not welcome to work in the company.
“Any form of discrimination is totally unacceptable under our code of conduct and many other rules of course,” he told the Financial Times. “People who are AfD quite simply don’t fit with these requirements as I see it, and should therefore ask themselves whether we are the right employer for them. There’s a system of values that a company like Bertelsmann stands for.”
Data visualisation by Jonathan Vincent
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