Germany’s Shrinking Steel Industry Collides With Key State Vote

08 May 2017

The fate of Thyssenkrupp’s 22,000 steel workers in the state — Germany’s traditional industrial heartland and home to Bayer AG, Deutsche Telekom AG, Deutsche Post A Gand all of Germany’s biggest utilities — is of particular concern for State Prime Minister Hannelore Kraft, whose SPD has close union ties and needs their backing to win another term.

“Kraft needs to show solidarity and have our backs and fight with us for the future of steel-making at Thyssenkrupp,” Wilhelm Segerath, the company’s top labor leader, said in a phone interview. “The merger should be buried. Thyssenkrupp can develop better on its own and to do that we need the support of politicians.”

The most recent poll in NRW, as the state is called, showed the SPD’s support declining to 35 percent and the CDU rising to 29 percent — cutting nearly in half what was an 11 percentage point gap in March. The CDU, led in the state by Armin Laschet, sees an opening to unseat Kraft, who has run NRW since 2010. The party says she’s hamstrung because she currently governs with the pro-environment Greens, and argues that the CDU would do more to prioritize the steel industry.

“We would speak with a much clearer voice for this industry and intervene in a different way in Brussels and Berlin,” Hendrik Wuest, the CDU’s spokesman for economic policy in the state parliament, said in a phone interview. “Employment in the steel industry itself is at stake and the long value chain that depends on it.”

Source -bloomberg