Authors: Rachel Mohr, Sarah Marsh and Andreas Link
STUTTGART, Germany, Feb 13 (Reuters) – On a dark morning in February, workers on the morning shift at Mercedes-Benz’s vast Lower Turkheim plant encountered activists from Zentrum, a self-styled union affiliated with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.
The pamphlet they distributed before the factory works council elections read “Game Changer”. Zentrum aims to challenge mainstream unions, which it says have failed to protect the car industry from thousands of redundancies.
For now, the far right is limited to the fringes of auto union politics, hoping to tap into the anxieties of workers in Germany’s powerful industry to build grassroots influence that could help the AfD gain a foothold on the national stage. The country’s automakers are grappling with the shift to electric vehicles and competition from China.
“We have established ourselves,” said Oliver Hilburger, 56, who founded Zentrum in 2009 and works at the factory in Stuttgart.
Reuters interviewed about a dozen union and works council representatives and officials in the auto industry, as well as politicians and activists ahead of elections held every four years at companies across Germany.
The chancellor of one of Germany’s 16 states, several senior members of the country’s ruling coalition and trade union representatives have said they fear the far right will win votes between March and May.
Last year, the Alternative for Germany was labeled a “right-wing extremist” by federal authorities and shunned by the mainstream of German politics.
“If groups close to the AfD are able to gain a stronger foothold in business, that should be cause for concern,” said the governor, who declined to be named in order to speak freely.
“Elections alone are not enough”
Works councils are the backbone of the corporatist model, which supporters say helped promote stability and prosperity in post-World War II Germany, giving some 37 percent of employees a formal voice within the company.
Officials at IG Metall, the main union for companies including Mercedes and Volkswagen, said a number of far-right candidates planned to run in elections for unions in the southern heartland of the car industry.
While some of them have little to do with the AfD, they could provide a larger platform to appeal to workers for the party, which leads national opinion polls and is expected to make inroads in five state elections this year.
“Union MPs can present the AfD’s arguments to tens of thousands of people every quarter at trade union congresses,” said Lukas Hezel, part of IG Metall’s initiative against the far right. “This is a more valuable political position than local councillors.”
Seizing the opportunity, the Alternative for Germany is lending more support to Zentrum, the most established far-right labor movement.
“If you want to shape a society, elections alone are not enough,” Sebastian Muenzenmaier, deputy parliamentary leader of the Alternative for Germany, said after hosting Zentrum at a party event ahead of the March 22 elections in Rhineland-Palatinate state.
“You need a mosaic – political parties, trade unions, cultural initiatives, maybe musicians, publishers, bookstores. Everyone has a role but all pulling in the same direction.”
Mercedes, Volkswagen and VW-owned Audi declined to comment directly on the works council elections but issued statements promoting democratic values such as tolerance and diversity.
“The Alternative for Germany promotes economic policies and in some cases constitutional and xenophobic positions that are incompatible with the values of Mercedes-Benz,” a company spokesman said.
Some observers warn of broader risks to democracy if big unions are weakened, similar to the fragmentation of the labor movement during the Great Depression of the 1930s, which weakened their ability to organize against Nazism.
“It would be fatal to think that the unions would emerge unscathed from the next works council election,” said Klaus Doer, a trade union expert at the University of Kassel. “The potential for a breakthrough is there.”
In Untertürkheim, some workers stepped over four Zentrum activists, but many accepted campaign materials.
“We’ve processed 800 flyers,” Hilberg said, taking another box out of his van.
The rise of the movement
Big trade 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 Alternative for Germany says unions serve a left-wing agenda and no longer represent ordinary workers, and has sought to discredit them through a series of parliamentary inquiries.
“Today, it’s no longer the cigar-smoking factory boss who bullies people. Today, if people have the wrong opinion, they are more afraid of powerful works councils,” Hilberg said in an interview.
A leaflet sent to Mercedes workers accused IG Metall, which has more than 2 million members, of standing by as job cuts increased but offered few concrete proposals to resolve the crisis.
Hilberg said Zentrum’s status as a union is controversial because it does not participate in collective bargaining negotiations and currently has tens of thousands of union members across the country, including about 150 works council members and 15 affiliates. Seven of them are in Untertürkheim, and there will be 207 candidates this year, slightly more than in 2022.
Hilberg said an affiliated group at Volkswagen’s all-electric plant in Zwickau will field 24 candidates, up from eight in 2022, while Zentrum’s three candidates at Audi Ingolstadt could break through at the Bayerische Autocenter.
Hilberg could not give a total number of candidates.
“These are showcase companies, and success here is symbolically important,” Dole said. “If they can succeed at Mercedes or Volkswagen, it shows they could be a force to be reckoned with.”
The crisis in the car manufacturing industry may provide an opportunity to gain protest votes among workers who are disenchanted with established parties and unions.
In the past, weekend football results were the focus of workshop discussions, Hilberg said, but now, “the conversation almost exclusively turns to politics.”
Skinhead guitarist turned Labor leader
The AfD initially put Zentrum, whose leader Hilberg had been a guitarist in a skinhead band for years, on a list of “incompatible” groups that were too extreme to work with. In 2022, as the party moved right, members voted to abolish it.
Hannover city councilor Jens Keller is one of several officials from the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party and a Zentrum activist.
“The Alternative for Germany has found all these people they already have… and they now increasingly want them to be active in workplace politics,” said Andre Schmidt, a political analyst at the University of Leipzig.
An exit poll conducted by Infratest dimap after last year’s federal election showed that some 38% of blue-collar workers voted for the Alternative for Germany, up 17 percentage points from 2021, while only 12% chose the center-left Social Democrats.
AFD: New Workers Party?
Hildegard Mueller, president of the VDA auto industry association, warned that “simplistic, populist and emotional” far-right messages could be persuasive given job insecurity and inaction from policymakers.
“It’s not just the AfD waiting at the factory gates; representatives close to the AfD will also be on the list,” she said.
Traditional unions are fighting back: Hezel said they have hired 10 people for the Association for the Defense of Democracy, which was founded by IG Metall in 2019 to counter extremism in the workplace. They view groups like Zentrum as fake unions whose goal is to undermine rather than defend workers’ interests.
The Christian Trade Union Confederation (CGB) has warned that some union candidates have not disclosed links to the AfD, saying they are “more dangerous than Zentrum, which at least is known to have close ties to the AfD”.
A member of the Opel Ruesselsheim works council who was elected on the CGB metalworkers union list in March 2025 is reported to have links to far-right groups.
Union density has roughly halved since the 1990s, accounting for around 14% of German employees, while the Alternative for Germany challenges the inherent role of unions in civil society and politics.
“The union is the only organization still competing with them to represent the workers’ voice,” 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)
