Tuesday evening in the Villa Reitzenstein, the stately government seat of the Prime Minister of Baden-Württemberg in the best location in Stuttgart. The view down to the sea of houses in the valley basin is magnificent. Creaking parquet floors, high stucco ceilings, in the wood-paneled library the obligatory herbal tea is already waiting for the host on a small table, served in a cup with a golden national coat of arms. The ambience up here in the elegant villa on the hill seems removed from everyday life. Winfried Kretschmann takes a seat – and first tells us about another world. From Laiz, Kretschmann’s home village in the Danube Valley, a good 100 kilometers south of Stuttgart on the other side of the Swabian Alb. Fear of the future in the “model country” “You can’t live sensibly in the country without a car,” says the Prime Minister. He still does a lot of things himself on weekends when he can. And for that he needs a car. “I get the sand from the gravel quarry and I take the bulky waste away with the trailer,” reports Kretschmann, who will be 78 years old in May. “A few months ago, the people at the landfill were amazed that the Prime Minister was bringing his old windows in a boiler suit.” This evening, however, he is wearing a pale green tie, cufflinks and a white shirt. The car is not only indispensable for the private citizen Kretschmann, the same also applies to maintaining prosperity in southwest Germany. And that is exactly the problem. The auto industry, which has made Baden-Württemberg rich, is in the deepest crisis in its history. Domestic car companies such as Bosch, Mercedes, Porsche and ZF are cutting tens of thousands of jobs. The industrial collapse became apparent years ago. Now he’s here. In the long-prosperous “model country”, of which Swabians and Baden residents were always so proud, a completely new mood is spreading: fear of the future.Green patron saint of the auto industryKretschmann has become a kind of green patron saint of the domestic auto industry in his old age. Together with the prime ministers of the other 15 federal states, he published an appeal to the EU Commission in October in which the country leaders called on the EU to revise the ban on new cars with internal combustion engines in Europe planned for 2035. Employee protest at Bosch in Waiblingen in September 2025.dpaAnd Kretschmann wasn’t just there. Industry representatives report that the Green Party, together with the CSU man Markus Söder from Bavaria and the Social Democrat Olaf Lies from Lower Saxony, was the driving force behind the federal state initiative. A little later, Chancellor Friedrich Merz also wrote a letter to EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, in which he called for a revision of the “combustion ban”. “It was based one-to-one on the initiative of Kretschmann, Söder and Lies,” says one person involved. “That was a rookie mistake on my part,” Kretschmann of all people. When he was unexpectedly elected as the first and to date only Green Prime Minister in Germany in 2011 after decades on the opposition bench, it initially caused alarm in the executive suites of the car companies. “Fewer cars are of course better than more,” said Kretschmann in an interview in April 2011, when he was not even in office yet. In the future, companies would have to “sell mobility concepts and not just cars.” The excitement was huge. The car managers had never heard such words from the mouth of a Baden-Württemberg state father. It was “a beginner’s mistake” on his part, says the Kretschmann today with clarity. The sentence will probably haunt him until the end of his days. “I just had in my head: Stuttgart was the traffic jam capital at the time, how could that be done other than with fewer cars?” But for some people only one thing stuck: “The Prime Minister wanted the car industry to be in crisis.” Three days later, the then Daimler boss Dieter Zetsche was sitting in his state parliament office. It was agreed that many zero-emission cars would not be a problem at all. Kretschmann learned his lessons from this: “You just can’t do headline politics.” He was annoyed about the ban on combustion engines. He didn’t do that anymore. The more difficult the situation became for the automotive industry, the more intensively he took care of it. This became clear to the nationwide public in 2017 at the latest. He was filmed at the Green Party conference talking to a member of the Bundestag about the proposal for a ban on combustion engines in 2030. You have to “make sure it works at all and not make radical statements,” he complained. Mercedes manager Källenius (right) and Kretschmann 2017.dpaToday there is hardly a politician in Germany who is as intensively involved with the industry as Kretschmann – apart from perhaps his colleague from Lower Saxony, whose state itself has a stake in a car company. “He always looked at life and said: It has to work in everyday life. You can’t live on wishful thinking,” says Volker Ratzmann, who ran capital affairs for the Prime Minister in the Berlin state representation for eight years.Kretschmann, the “Pragmatism Taliban” Kretschmann will no longer receive too many visitors at Villa Reitzenstein. On March 8th, people from Baden and Württemberg will elect a new state parliament; after fifteen years, it will no longer run. So far, the CDU of the thirty-seven-year-old candidate Manuel Hagel is leading in the polls, but the Greens with their sixty-year-old candidate Cem Özdemir have recently caught up. A politician with a similar paternal demeanor as the incumbent is not on offer. But a lot of his politics, especially when it comes to cars. Ultimately, the election will be decided by who most credibly represents a continuation of the Kretschmann line for the country’s prosperity around Daimler and Bosch. That’s why the CDU criticized the Greens in the election campaign, but not the outgoing Prime Minister. The Christian Democrat Thomas Strobl has been his deputy for ten years and is running again in the Heilbronn constituency. “Winfried Kretschmann and I are ‘pragmatism Taliban’,” says Strobl. “We make politics for the country and the people, simply free of any ideology.” Strobl recalls how the head of government, before his first re-election in 2016, was seen in a commercial with a Mercedes S-Class and how he hugged a diesel engine during a factory visit in the middle of the scandal over manipulated emissions values. In the subsequent debate about possible driving bans, he “always played a good role.” The bosses of Bosch and Mercedes are full of praise. Mercedes boss Ola Källenius also remembers the episode with the diesel engine. At that time, a wave of public outrage swept over the car tricksters. Kretschmann demonstratively visited the Mercedes engine factory in Stuttgart-Untertürkheim to look at a new diesel engine and to support the beaten engineers. “He stood next to our development team and said: This is the best and cleanest diesel engine in the world.” Källenius was impressed by that. “An opportunist wouldn’t have done that, only someone with backbone would.” Green politicians Kretschmann and ÖzdemirdpaIn the auto industry, that much is certain, not a bad word will be heard about the Green Marathon head of government, neither from the bosses nor from the employees. “Kretschmann and car, that fits,” says Bosch boss Stefan Hartung. The Green politician always knew “that as Prime Minister of Baden-Württemberg you also represent the automobile industry.” Kretschmann recognized one thing very quickly as Prime Minister, remembers Roman Zitzelsberger, who was head of the IG Metall union in the southwest for a long time: “If things aren’t going well economically, then climate protection won’t work either.” And at the moment things are not going well economically at all. Kretschmann is doing what he can to help, says Zitzelsberger. Not everyone likes the proximity of the green Ober-Realo to the auto industry. One of his toughest critics is Jürgen Resch, the managing director of German Environmental Aid. The two Swabians Resch and Kretschmann have known each other for more than four decades. They were once on a first-name basis with each other. “Kretschmann bows down to the car managers.” Resch reports that he had “a respectful exchange” with the CDU candidate Manuel Hagel, as well as with Cem Özdemir. But no longer with the Prime Minister. After a heated legal exchange between environmental aid and the state government over the driving bans for diesel cars, Kretschmann essentially broke off contact. “He has difficulties with his ability to dialogue,” believes environmental activist Resch. “Kretschmann has forgotten how to walk upright, he bows down in front of the car managers,” he says. What good is it for the business location, asks Resch, that Kretschmann, as a lobbyist for car manufacturers, is helping to keep the combustion engine alive when electric drives are the future? The Kretschmann era was 15 lost years in which it was not possible to make the country’s most important industry future-proof. Looking back, the time a decade and a half ago when Kretschmann became Prime Minister was a golden era. The Swabian car manufacturers earned brilliantly, especially in the then new mega sales market of China. They didn’t realize that the electric car revolution had been brewing for a long time. “The tendency was already there to insist on what you have,” says Kretschmann at the evening meeting with the F.A.S. in the Villa Reitzenstein. “That’s the curse of success, that you don’t see disruptive developments.”It now sounds milder than it used to.It now sounds milder than it used to. In 2017 he complained in an interview with the F.A.Z. still: “The car industry always stonewalls when it comes to promoting new technologies. That was the case with unleaded petrol, with the catalytic converter, now it’s the same again. People always talk about the death of the car.”Times have changed, the industry is on the verge of a crash. Some experts on the industrial structure in the southwest fear that half of the more than 200,000 jobs at car manufacturers and suppliers in Baden-Württemberg could disappear within a few years. In addition to the missed innovations and the problems with electric cars, there are now also the slump in sales in China and tariffs in the United States. Some fear that the successful auto region around Stuttgart could fare like the Ruhr area after the decline of heavy industry or the American Detroit after the end of car production, which is one of the main motives for Trump’s customs policy. The country needs new sources of prosperity. Kretschmann rejects such comparisons over tea in the Villa Reitzenstein. But he can describe very vividly that the crisis is eating away at Swabians’ self-image. “Of course it does something to the people. Working at Daimler or Bosch used to be close to civil servant status. Now jobs are being cut and you notice that others are attacking the global market on an equal footing,” he says. “But the high-wage country principle only works as long as we are technologically a lot ahead of the others.” The AfD is looking for salvation in the past. Kretschmann says: “That is of course illusionary.”More on the topicThere is one thing that sets Kretschmann apart from other car lobbyists like Markus Söder: He never said that the industry didn’t have to change. And he believes that the country needs new sources of prosperity. That’s why, as a precautionary measure, he took a look around Pittsburgh, the former US steel city, which a flourishing health sector helped to revive. If a successor sits in the wood-paneled library of Villa Reitzenstein, then the long-term head of government will have more time to put on the boiler suit and drive around in the trailer. Whether this will work with an electric car at some point and whether this car will come from a Swabian factory – that depends more on his successors than on himself.
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