In Bochum, a town in the German industrial Ruhr valley, cheesemonger Heike Wischnewski said she was contemplating casting her ballot for the far-right Alternative for Germany.
The 60-year-old, whose parents emigrated from Poland, is a Social Democrat at heart. “I would like to vote for the SPD again,” she said. But the problem is its candidate, Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
“When I listen to Scholz, it’s ‘we did this, we’ve done that’. And everyone is wondering: where? You would think he lives in another world,” Wischnewski said.
While she is wary of extremists in the AfD, Wischnewski said she “would like to believe Alice Weidel”, the party leader and chancellor candidate. “Work must pay off again. And when it comes to immigration, I am also of the opinion that anyone who wants to live here must do their part.”
As the campaign draws to a close ahead of Sunday’s federal elections, the mood in the Ruhr, an SPD stronghold that became the symbol of Germany’s postwar social-market economic model, highlights a sense of political upheaval in Europe’s largest democracy.
On Sunday, the AfD could for the first time win direct constituencies in the Ruhr, a region with high immigration and which has struggled with deindustrialisation.
Scholz, who triggered early elections in November after pulling the plug on his unpopular coalition with the Liberals and the Greens, could lead his party to its worst result since 1887 with a meagre 15 per cent.
Such a disastrous result for the party of former chancellors Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt and Gerhard Schröder would underline a rightwing shift in Europe’s biggest economy, which has stagnated for the past two years. While the country’s economic woes are a concern for voters, the election campaign has been dominated by a fraught debate over migration heightened by a series of deadly attacks by migrants.
A weak SPD would also herald greater difficulties for conservative leader Friedrich Merz to form a stable coalition. Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party, the CSU, are predicted to win the election with about 30 per cent and have ruled out partnering with the AfD, which is likely to come in second and secure its best result yet on about 20 per cent.
But Merz’s coalition building could be complicated if smaller parties reach the 5 per cent vote threshold and enter the Bundestag at a time when Germany needs to tackle urgent issues, such as Donald Trump’s overtures to Russia about ending the war in Ukraine without involving any European partners.
One such party could be far-left Die Linke, which has experienced a late surge in support and is predicted to win about 6 per cent of the vote. A Forsa poll this week showed a coalition between the SPD and the CDU/CSU might not reach a majority in parliament.
Professor Manfred Güllner at Forsa said he had never seen such level of discontent with an incumbent chancellor and coalition. “The bottom line is extreme dissatisfaction with the coalition.”
At the heart of Germany’s democratic challenges lay the steady erosion of mainstream parties, which used to “cover a wide range of voters, groups with different interests, bringing them under one roof,” Güllner said. “They have lost that ability.”
The Ruhr region is a former coal-mining bastion and home to steel conglomerate Thyssenkrupp, whose 110-metre tall blast furnaces in its sprawling Duisburg plant has long been a source of pride among its workers, the Kruppianer.
But the company, which is grappling with a downturn in the auto industry — its main client — and struggling to compete with cheap Chinese imports, has announced plans to slash 11,000 jobs in Duisburg, or 40 per cent of its workforce there.
The region has experienced hardships before with the closures of its mines between the 1970s and 1990s. It has since attracted service-oriented jobs, notably around its three universities and logistics companies. But the Covid-19 pandemic, followed by two years of economic downturn under Scholz’s coalition, has heightened political resentment in its poorest parts.
Hans-Peter Noll, who chairs the Zollverein, a former coal complex closed in 1986 that now hosts a museum and start-ups, said the “big structures, the ones that looked after workers, that solved everything, don’t exist any more”.
“Populism is unfortunately offering seemingly good solutions to the losers of this transformation,” said Noll, the son and grandson of coal miners.
These trends were playing out at the Maria Sibylla Merian high school in Bochum earlier this week, where students had organised a debate with local candidates.
AfD’s Daniel Zerbin explained to the more than 200 students, among them many first-time voters, that the country must control “unbridled mass migration and decide who comes in here”.
Die Linke candidate Cansın Köktürk then went on the offensive. Pointing to police data showing there was no relative increase in migrant-led crime in the country, she mocked Zerbin, a criminologist. “Don’t let yourself be told crap,” she told the students.
Serdar Yüksel, the constituency’s SPD lawmaker, then asked those who had arrived in Germany in the past decade to stand up. After a handful of students did so hesitantly, he asked those of immigrant descent to join. All but a few rose. “You wouldn’t be here if the AfD governed in this country!” Yüksel said as the crowd erupted in applause.
The AfD was seeking to lure the workers who no longer feel represented by the SPD, Zerbin said after the panel, as a few students came to him for selfies. “The SPD has become a party of higher earners,” said the former Afghanistan veteran, whose father worked in the mining industry. “It is no longer a workers’ party in the classic sense. And we are taking on this role.”
Yüksel, whose Kurdish father emigrated from Turkey to work at Thyssenkrupp in 1964, said his party needed to foster a “knowledge-based service society”.
“We should not be a workers’ party, but the party of labour,” the 51-year-old politician said. “A university professor, a software engineer, a teacher are also workers.”
Yüksel said the country’s fraught migration debate was fuelling the AfD. In 2015, Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed nearly 1mn asylum seekers from Syria, Afghanistan and other countries, saying “we can do this”, Yüksel recalled. “But she didn’t say how.”
Municipalities were not given sufficient federal support to integrate the newcomers, he argued. Instead, “it feels like the cities have less money for swimming pools, less money for gyms, less money for schools”.
The pandemic lockdowns and Russia’s war in Ukraine had compounded resentment and fears, he said. “Many come to us and say: ‘you are the warmongers. Olaf Scholz is taking us to the third world war’.”
While Yüksel is in a relatively safe seat, his SPD colleague Markus Töns is in trouble in Gelsenkirchen, a town with higher unemployment in the northern rim of the Ruhr area, which could flip to the AfD.
The 61-year-old MP, whose father was a trade unionist at IG Metall, said he was bracing for a nationwide “debacle” for his party on Sunday.
His town, Töns said, had suffered from a high influx of migrants, not only refugees from the Middle East, but what he called “poverty migration” from eastern EU members such as Bulgaria and Romania.
He lobbied in Berlin for extra funds, but “it took too long, two and a half years” to figure out “who was in charge”, he said in a swipe at Scholz’s government.
“People say ‘we want solutions now’ — we’re offering something too late, and now the coalition is over.”
Data visualisation by Martin Stabe
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