As the far right rises in eastern Germany, companies struggle to attract skilled foreign workers

JENA, Germany (AP) — When electrical engineer Preetam Gaikwad first moved to Jena in 2013, she was smitten by what the eastern German city had to offer: a prestigious university, top research institutions, and cutting-edge technology companies, global leaders in their field.

Eleven years later, the Indian native takes a more sober view.

“I’m really worried about the development of the political situation here,” Gaikwad, 43 said. Jena is in the eastern German state of Thuringia, which has elections on Sept. 1.

The far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, is currently leading the polls with about 30% support, far ahead of the center-right Christian Democrats (21%) and the center-left Social Democrats of Chancellor Olaf Scholz (7%).

The AfD’s anti-foreigner stance is the cornerstone of its campaign, raising concern among businesses like Jenoptik, Gaikwad’s employer. The company, which supplied lens assemblies for Perseverance, the NASA remote vehicle on Mars, employs 1,680 people in Jena and more than 4,600 globally.

Jenoptik, one of the few internationally successful businesses in Jena,depends on being able to attract and retain a highly skilled workforce, much of it from outside Germany. The rise of the AfD is making that more difficult, says Jenoptik CEO Stefan Traeger.

More and more prospective employees tell Traeger that while they would love to work for Jenoptik, they won’t take a job there because they don’t want to live in a state dominated by a hard-right party that ostracizes migrants or other minorities such as members of the LGBTQI+ community.

Traeger, a Jena native who studied in the U.S., told the AP he hopes that after the election “we will still be as open, free and democratic a country as we are now. That’s what we need in order to move the company forward.”

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This story, supported by the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, is part of an ongoing Associated Press series covering threats to democracy in Europe.

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Germany is already facing a massive skilled labor shortage with experts estimating that the country needs about 400,000 skilled immigrants each year as the workforce ages and shrinks. Long considered Europe’s economic powerhouse, Germany was recently rated the world’s worst-performing major developed economy by the International Monetary Fund.

Thuringia is one of the poorest states in Germany, a legacy of communist rule in what was East Germany from 1949 to 1990. Salaries are lower than average, and it has few major employers outside the public sector. Most young people, especially women, leave for opportunities elsewhere, a brain drain to the more affluent west that began in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, and has not stopped since.

The rise of the AfD has been catalyzed by high inflation and immigration. In 2023, Germany took in 1.9 million new inhabitants, while 1.2 million peopleleft the country permanently, putting net migration at 663,000. While only a minority settle in Germany’s poorer eastern states, anti-immigration sentiment runs high.

The AfD’s Thuringia branch is particularly radical: its regional leader, Bjoern Hoecke, has described the Holocaust memorial in Berlin as a “monument of shame” and called for Germany to make a “180-degree turn” in the way it remembers its past, including the Nazis. In 2020, the branch was put under official surveillance by the German domestic intelligence service as a “proven right-wing extremist” group.

Thuringia’s cities and villages are plastered with AfD election posters carrying the slogan “summer, sun, remigration,” and the photo of a plane dubbed “deportation airline” that’s meant to fly out all those people that the party and its voters don’t want in Germany.

Nonetheless, the AfD in an interview with the AP sought to downplay the issue of what it prefers to call “remigration.”

Remigration “refers to those who have no right to stay in this country and no prospect of staying because there is no reason for protective status, because there is no reason for their flight or for their migration in the sense of the applicable laws,” said Torben Braga, deputy speaker of the AfD Thuringia and member of the Thuringian state parliament)

Migrants with work permits would “of course not be affected,” he said.

The experience of Gaikwad, a legal migrant, is rather different. Some of the racism she’s experienced is subtle, some is outright discrimination, but it is always hurtful and humiliating.

Like the supermarket cashier who bags up the groceries for all the other customers and wishes them a nice day, only to slam Gaikwad’s bag down next to her shopping without a word.

Or the elderly neighbor she greets in German who stops her one day to say, “It makes me uncomfortable when I see so many people with strange skin and hair color here in Jena.”

More than anything, Gaikwad was shocked when she took her daughter, now 10, to the playground and overheard a little German boy telling her that he was making a body powder for her “so that you will become a normal person again.”

The AfD is especially popular in rural areas — and that’s 70% of the population in Thuringia — says Axel Salheiser, the director of research at the Institute for Democracy and Civil Society in Jena.

“Even when there are no majorities so far, there are considerable minorities who vote for the AfD, either to express their protest or to openly express anti-immigration and anti-liberal positions,” he told the AP.

When it comes to Thuringia as a place to do business, Salheiser said, that means not only work migrants will think twice about whether they will move there, but “potential investors will also ask themselves whether they want to locate their company or their branch of business here.”

“It’s a big problem for the region, if the impression arises that significant parts of the population not only tolerate anti-immigration and anti-diversity positions, but also support ... them,” he added.

A recent poll of more than 900 German companies by the Institute for the German Economy also showed that a majority sees the AfD as a risk, both for securing skilled workers and for investment in the region.

Last year, businesses and individuals set up Cosmopolitan Thuringia, a grassroots network to promote tolerance, diversity and “indivisible human rights,” which now has more than 7,940 members.

Among them is Jenoptik, which makes a point of promoting the diversity of its workforce, showcasing its foreign employees on posters at its Jena headquarters.

Gaikwad says Jenoptik’s open-mindedness, her great job and support from friends are what keep her in Jena, despite the racism she and her family have experienced.

“I have great faith in democracy, in the good in people,” she said.

Jenoptik’s CEO Traeger is grateful for Gaikwad and every other international employee he can retain in Jena.

“We need employees with creative potential. We Thuringians are a creative bunch, but we won’t be able to do it all by ourselves,” Traeger said. “We also need people who come from other parts of the world, who perhaps have different views, different beliefs, different skin colors or whatever.”

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Kerstin Sopke and Pietro De Cristofaro contributed reporting.