The future of Opel in Eisenach is uncertain, the parent company wants to save. Now Thuringia AfD boss Höcke wanted to support the workforce in their protest – but the struggled.
Björn Höcke
Wednesday, 25.04.2018
12:52 clock
“Goodbye, goodbye”: Thuringia AFD-Boss Björn Höcke is visibly upset when the OpelEmployees keep calling him those words. Actually he wanted at the Opel plant in Eisenach on Tuesday to support the workforce at a demonstration. But on the help of the AfD man employees and union members preferred to.
Nearly 1400 participants had gathered at the factory to protest against the planned austerity measures at the site in Thuringia. Parent company Peugeot SA (PSA) has already implemented austerity measures in France and the United Kingdom and now wants the bring German works on course,
The solidarity of the AfD is not needed, said the works council. Opel workers and shop stewards pushed Höcke and about half a dozen other AfD supporters farther and farther from the rally.
Höcke himself also published pictures of the event on his Facebook profile, and on Twitter he wrote: “We as AfD are fighting alongside the Opel employees in Eisenach who are worried about their jobs.” That Höcke and his team were undesirable on the spot, there is no talk in the postings.
Höcke is – also because of his speech to the German culture of remembrance more than a year ago – as a right wing in the AfD. In the debate on the future of the Eisenach Opel plant, for which the workforce demands investment commitments from the French Opel parent company PSA, Höcke had recently stated that Germany needed “finally a patriotic economic policy” again.
Recently, there had been the fear in some corporate headquarters that increasingly employees with a right-wing attitude could be elected to works councils. Daimler CEO Dieter Zetsche was alarmed recently about the growing influence of right-wing employee representatives.