By Rachel More, Sarah Marsh and Andreas Rinke
STUTTGART, Germany, Feb 13 (Reuters) – On a dark February morning at Mercedes-Benz’s vast Untertuerkheim plant, workers arriving for their early shift are greeted by activists from Zentrum, a self-styled union affiliated with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.
“Game-changer,” reads the pamphlet they are distributing before the elections to the factory’s works council, in which Zentrum aims to challenge the mainstream unions it says have failed to protect the auto industry from thousands of job cuts.
Currently confined to the fringes of auto union politics, the far right hopes to exploit anxieties among workers in Germany’s power industry to build grassroots influence that could help the AfD on a national stage. The country’s automakers are struggling with the shift to EVs and Chinese competition.
“We established ourselves,” said Oliver Hilburger, 56, who founded Zentrum in 2009 and himself works at the plant in Stuttgart.
Reuters spoke to around a dozen representatives of trade unions and works councils and officials in the auto sector ahead of the elections, which are held by companies across Germany every four years, as well as politicians and activists.
The premier of one of Germany’s 16 states, several senior members of the national governing coalition and union representatives were among those who said they are concerned that the far right will gain in the votes that take place from March to May.
The AfD, which was classified by federal authorities as “right-wing extremist” last year, is shunned by Germany’s political mainstream.
“It should be a cause for concern if groups close to the AfD can gain a stronger position in companies,” said the state premier, who declined to be identified in order to speak freely.
‘ONE ELECTION IS NOT ENOUGH’
Works councils are a pillar of the corporate model that proponents say helped foster stability and prosperity in post-World War II Germany, giving a formal voice to about 37% of employees within companies.
Officials at IG Metall, the main union at companies such as Mercedes and Volkswagen, say many far-right candidates plan to stand in elections for works councils in the southern heartland of the auto industry.
Although some are only loosely affiliated with the AfD, they could give the party – which leads national opinion polls and is on track to make gains in five state elections this year – a bigger platform to woo workers.
“A works councilor can present AfD arguments once every three months to tens of thousands of people in a works assembly,” said Lukas Hezel, part of an IG Metall initiative to fight the extreme right. “This is a much more valuable political position than a local councillor.”
Spotting an opportunity, the AfD is giving more support to Zentrum, the most established far-right labor movement.
“If you want to shape a society, elections alone are not enough,” AfD deputy parliamentary leader Sebastian Muenzenmaier said after welcoming Zentrum to a party event ahead of the March 22 state election in Rhineland-Palatinate.
“You need a mosaic – the party, a trade union, cultural initiatives, maybe a musician, a publisher, a bookstore. Each one has its role, but they all move in the same direction.”
VW-owned Mercedes, Volkswagen and Audi declined to comment directly on the works council elections but issued statements touting democratic values such as tolerance and diversity.
“The AfD supports economic policies and, in some cases, even constitutional and xenophobic positions that are incompatible with the values of Mercedes-Benz,” said a company spokesperson.
Some observers warn of a wider risk to democracy if major unions weaken, drawing parallels with the fragmentation of labor movements during the Great Depression that weakened their ability to organize against Nazism in the 1930s.
“To assume that the unions will go through the next works council elections with nothing more than a black eye would be fatal,” said Klaus Doerre, a trade union expert at the University of Kassel. “The potential for advancement is there.”
In Untertuerkheim, some workers pass by the four Zentrum activists but most accept the campaign material.
“We have 800 flyers,” says Hilburger, bringing another box from his van.
THE BOTTOM OF A MOVEMENT
The big unions, which describe themselves as non-partisan but explicitly defend values such as social justice and opposition to racism and far-right extremism, have traditionally dominated works council elections.
The AfD says the unions serve a left-wing agenda that no longer represents ordinary workers, and has sought to discredit them through a series of parliamentary inquiries.
“Today, it is no longer the cigar-smoking factory owner who bullies people. Today, people are more afraid of a strong works council if they have a bad opinion,” Hilburger said in an interview.
The leaflet distributed to Mercedes workers accuses IG Metall, which has more than 2 million members, of waiting as job cuts increase but offers few concrete proposals to resolve the crisis.
Zentrum, whose status as a union is disputed because it does not participate in collective bargaining negotiations, currently has about 150 works council members plus 15 affiliates, Hilburger said, out of tens of thousands nationwide. Seven are in Untertuerkheim, where 207 candidates will appear this year, slightly more than in 2022.
An affiliated group at Volkswagen’s all-electric plant in Zwickau will field 24 candidates, up from eight in 2022, Hilburger said, while the three Zentrum candidates at Audi Ingolstadt could advance to the Bavaria automotive center.
Hilburger could not give a total number of candidates.
“These are showcase companies, success here is symbolically important,” said Doerre. “If they can succeed at Mercedes or Volkswagen, it indicates that maybe they are a force to be reckoned with.”
The crisis in car production can offer a chance to gather protest votes from workers disenchanted with established parties and trade unions.
Where weekend football results used to dominate the chatter on the shop floor, now “the conversation immediately and almost exclusively turns to politics”, said Hilburger.
SKINHEAD GUITARIST INDAUR LEAD LABORIST
The AfD initially put Zentrum, whose leader Hilburger has for years played guitar in a skinhead band, on an “incompatibility” list of organizations too extreme to work with. Members voted to remove it in 2022, when the party moved to the right.
Jens Keller, a city councilor in Hannover, is one of several AfD officials who are also Zentrum activists.
“The AfD discovered all these people who already have… Now more and more they want to become active in politics at the workplace,” said Andre Schmidt, a political analyst at the University of Leipzig.
An exit poll by Infratest dimap after last year’s federal election showed that around 38% of blue-collar workers voted for the AfD, an increase of 17 percentage points from 2021, while only 12% chose the centre-left Social Democrats.
AFD: THE PARTY OF THE NEW WORKERS?
Hildegard Mueller, who heads the car industry association VDA, warned that far-right “simple, populist and emotionally charged” messages could be persuasive because of job insecurity and policy-making inaction.
“Not only AfD is waiting at the factory doors; representatives close to AfD will be working on the lists,” she said.
Traditional unions are fighting back: Hezel said he hired 10 people for the Association for the Preservation of Democracy, founded by IG Metall in 2019 to fight extremism in the workplace. They argue that groups like Zentrum are sham unions whose aim is disruption that does not protect the interests of workers.
The Confederation of Christian Trade Unions (CGB) has warned that some works council candidates are not disclosing links to the AfD, describing them as “more dangerous than Zentrum, whose closeness to the AfD is at least known”.
An Opel Ruesselsheim works council member elected in March 2025 on the slate of the CGB metalworkers’ union was later reported to have links to far-right groups.
Trade union density has roughly halved since the 1990s, to around 14% of German employees, and the AfD has challenged their embedded role in civil society and politics.
“The unions are the only ones still competing with them to be the voice of the workers,” said Schmidt.
(Reporting by Rachel More, Sarah Marsh, Andreas Rinke and Christina Amann in Berlin, Ilona Wissenbach in Frankfurt and Joern Poltz in Munich; Editing by Catherine Evans)