By Rachel More, Sarah Marsh and Andreas Rinke
STUTTGART, Germany, Feb 13 (Reuters) – On a dark February morning at the massive Mercedes-Benz Untertuerkheim plant, workers arriving for an early shift are greeted by activists from Zentrum, a self-proclaimed trade union affiliated with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.
“A game changer,” reads the pamphlet it is handing out ahead of the plant’s works council elections, in which Zentrum aims to challenge 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 powerful industry to build grassroots influence that could help the AfD on the national stage. The country’s automakers are struggling with the shift to electric vehicles and Chinese competition.
“We settled down,” said Oliver Hilburger, 56, who founded Zentrum in 2009 and himself works at the Stuttgart factory.
Reuters spoke to about a dozen union and works council representatives and auto sector officials ahead of the election, held by German companies every four years, as well as politicians and activists.
The prime minister of one of Germany’s 16 states, several senior members of the national governing coalition and union representatives were among those who expressed concern that the far-right would make gains in the March to May vote.
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 could gain a stronger position in companies,” the state premier said, declining to be identified to speak freely.
“ELECTIONS ALONE ARE NOT ENOUGH”
Works councils are a pillar of the corporatist model that supporters say helped foster stability and prosperity in post-World War II Germany, giving about 37 percent of employees a formal voice within companies.
Officials at IG Metall, the main union at companies such as Mercedes and Volkswagen, say many far-right candidates plan to run in works council elections in the southern heartland of the auto industry.
Although some are only loosely affiliated with the AfD, they could give the party – which leads the national opinion polls and is on course for gains in five state elections this year – a bigger platform to woo workers.
“A company councilor can present AfD arguments once a quarter to tens of thousands of people at a works meeting,” said Lukas Hezel, part of an IG Metall initiative to counter the far-right. “That’s a much more valuable political position than a local councillor.”
Spotting an opportunity, AfD offers more support to Zentrum, the most established far-right labor movement.
“If you want to shape a society, elections are not enough,” AfD deputy parliamentary leader Sebastian Muenzenmaier said after hosting Zentrum at a party event ahead of Rhineland-Palatinate state elections on March 22.
“You need a mosaic – the party, a trade union, cultural initiatives, maybe a musician, a publisher, a bookstore. Everyone has their role, but they all move in the same direction.”
Mercedes, Volkswagen and VW-owned Audi declined to comment directly on the works council election, but issued statements acknowledging 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,” a company spokesman said.
Some observers warn of a broader risk to democracy if major unions are weakened, drawing parallels with the fragmentation of labor movements during the Great Depression, which undermined their ability to organize against Nazism in the 1930s.
“To assume that unions get through the next works council election with nothing more than a black eye would be fatal,” said Klaus Doerre, a trade union expert at Kassel University. “The potential for a breakthrough is there.”
At Untertuerkheim, some workers stride past the four Zentrum activists, but many accept the campaign material.
“We went through 800 flyers,” Hilburger says, bringing another box from his van.
THE RISE OF A MOVEMENT
Large 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’s no longer the owner of the cigar factory who bullies people. Today, people are more afraid of a powerful works council if they have the wrong opinion,” Hilburger said in an interview.
The leaflet handed to Mercedes workers accuses IG Metall, which has more than 2 million members, of standing by as job cuts mount, but offers few concrete proposals to fix the crisis.
Zentrum, whose union status is contested because it does not participate in collective bargaining, currently has about 150 works council members plus 15 affiliates, Hilburger said, out of tens of thousands nationwide. Seven are in Untertuerkheim, where it will field 207 candidates this year, a few more than in 2022.
A group affiliated with Volkswagen’s Zwickau power plant will field 24 candidates, up from eight in 2022, Hilburger said, while Zentrum’s three candidates at Audi Ingolstadt could make a breakthrough in the Bavaria auto hub.
Hilburger could not provide a total number of candidates.
“These are showcase companies, success here is symbolically important,” Doerre said. “If I can succeed at Mercedes or Volkswagen, it means maybe I’m a force to be reckoned with.”
The car manufacturing crisis could offer a chance to get protest votes from workers disenchanted with established parties and unions.
Where the weekend’s football results dominated shop talk, now “the conversation turns immediately and almost exclusively to politics,” Hilburger said.
SKINHEAD GUITARIST BECOME LABOR LEADER
The AfD initially put Zentrum, whose leader Hilburger played guitar in a skinhead band for years, on an “incompatibilities” 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 Hanover, is one of several AfD officials who are also Zentrum activists.
“The AfD has discovered all these people that they already have… Now they want more and more that they become active in workplace politics,” said Andre Schmidt, a political analyst at Leipzig University.
An exit poll by Infratest dimap after last year’s federal election showed that around 38 percent of blue-collar workers voted for the AfD, up 17 percentage points from 2021, while just 12 percent chose the center-left Social Democrats.
AFD: WE THE WORKERS’ PARTY?
Hildegard Mueller, who heads the car industry association VDA, warned that “simple, populist and emotionally charged” far-right messages could prove persuasive given job insecurity and inaction by policymakers.
“It’s not just the AfD waiting at the factory gates; representatives close to the AfD will run on the lists,” she said.
Traditional unions fight back: Hezel said they have hired 10 people for the Association for the Preservation of Democracy, founded by IG Metall in 2019 to counter extremism in the workplace. They argue that groups like Zentrum are bogus unions whose purpose is to disrupt rather than support workers’ interests.
The Confederation of Christian Trade Unions (CGB) has warned that some works council candidates are not disclosing links to the AfD, calling them “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 list of the CGB metallurgist union was later reported to have links to far-right groups.
Union density has roughly halved since the 1990s, to around 14% of German employees, and the AfD has challenged their embedded role in civil and political society.
“The unions are the only ones still competing with them to be the voice of the workers,” Schmidt said.
(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)