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

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

Eleven years later, the Indian citizen takes a more serious view.

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

The far-right Alternative for Germany party currently leads opinion polls with around 30% of the vote, far ahead of the centre-right Christian Democrats (21%) and the centre-left Social Democrats led by Chancellor Olaf Scholz (7%).

The AfD’s anti-foreigner stance is a cornerstone of its campaign, raising concerns among companies like Jenoptik, Gaikwad’s employer. The company, which supplied lens kits for Perseverance, NASA’s Mars rover, employs 1,680 people in Jena and more than 4,600 worldwide.

Jenoptik, one of the few internationally successful companies in Jena, relies on its ability to attract and retain a highly skilled workforce, most of whom come from outside Germany. The rise of the AfD makes this more difficult, says Jenoptik CEO Stefan Traeger.

A growing number of potential employees tell Traeger that while they would love to work for Jenoptik, they wouldn’t take a job there because they don’t want to live in a state dominated by a far-right party that ostracizes immigrants or other minorities like members of the LGBTQI+ community.

“I hope that after the election we will remain the open, free and democratic country that we are now. That’s what we need to move the company forward,” Trager, a native of Jena who studied in the United States, told The Associated Press.

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

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Germany is already facing Severe shortage of skilled labor With experts estimating that the country needs around 400,000 skilled immigrants each year as its workforce ages and shrinks, Germany has long been considered the economic powerhouse of Europe, and was recently ranked as the world’s strongest economy. Worst performing major advanced economies By the International Monetary Fund.

Thuringia is one of Germany’s poorest states, a legacy of communist rule in East Germany from 1949 to 1990. Salaries are below average, and there are few major employers outside the public sector. Most young people, especially women, leave the country for work elsewhere, a brain drain to the richer west that began in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, and has not stopped since.

High inflation rates have contributed to ImmigrationIn 2023, Germany welcomed 1.9 million new residents, while 1.2 million left the country permanently, bringing net migration to 663,000. While only a minority settle in Germany’s poorer eastern states, anti-immigration sentiment is high.

The AfD’s Thuringia branch is particularly extreme: its regional leader, Björn Höcke, has called Berlin’s Holocaust memorial a “monument of shame” and called on Germany to “radically change” the way it remembers its past, including the Nazis. In 2020, the branch was placed under formal surveillance by Germany’s domestic intelligence service as a “proven right-wing extremist” group.

The towns and villages of Thuringia are filled with AfD election posters bearing the slogan “Summer, sun and immigration again” and a picture of a plane called the “deportation airline” that is supposed to take off all those people that the party and its voters do not want in Germany.

However, in an interview with The Associated Press, the AfD sought to downplay the issue of what it prefers to call “re-migration.”

“Re-migration refers to those who have no right to stay in this country and have no hope of staying because there is no reason for protection status, because there is no reason for their flight or migration in the applicable legal sense,” said Torben Braga, deputy leader of the AfD in Thuringia and a member of the Thuringian state parliament.

He added that immigrants with work permits “will of course not be affected.”

Gaikwad’s experience, a legal immigrant, is very different. Some of the racism she faced was subtle, some was overt discrimination, but it was always hurtful and humiliating.

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

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

What struck Gaikwad most was when she took her daughter, now 10, to the playground and heard a little German boy tell her he was making her body powder “so you can be a normal person again.”

The AfD is particularly popular in rural areas – which are home to 70% of the population in Thuringia – says Axel Salheiser, research director at the Institute for Democracy and Civil Society in Jena.

“Even when there is not yet a majority, there are large minorities who vote for the AfD, either to express their protest or to express openly anti-immigration and anti-liberal positions,” he told The Associated Press.

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

“It is a big problem for the region if there is an impression that large parts of the population not only tolerate anti-immigration and anti-diversity attitudes, but also support them,” he added.

A A recent survey of more than 900 German companies A poll by the German Economic Institute showed that a majority of Germans see the AfD as a threat, both in terms of securing skilled workers and investment in the region.

Last year, companies and individuals created Cosmopolitan Thuringia, a grassroots network promoting tolerance, diversity and “indivisible human rights,” which now has more than 7,940 members.

One such company is Jenoptik, which is keen to promote the diversity of its workforce, by displaying its foreign employees on posters at its headquarters in Jena.

Gaikwad says Genoptic’s openness, her great job, and the support of her friends are what keep her at Gena, despite the racism she and her family have faced.

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

Jenoptik CEO Traeger expressed his gratitude to Gaikwad and every other international employee he was able to retain in Jena.

“We need employees with creative potential. We Thuringians are very creative, but we can’t do everything on our own,” says Traeger. “We need people from other parts of the world, who may have different points of view, different beliefs, different skin colours or whatever.”

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Kirsten Sobecki and Pietro Di Cristofaro contributed reporting.