The deepening crisis at Germany’s largest company comes at a terrible time for Merz, who promised to reform the economy and revitalize the country’s industrial base when he took power in 2025.
Instead, automotive suppliers, chemical companies and other manufacturing firms are bleeding jobs, energy prices are high and the country is facing a growing wave of Chinese exports that threaten to gut important industries.
All of those worries are coalescing around VW, an industrial powerhouse that employs over 280,000 people in Germany.
“The crisis at VW is affecting the mood across the whole country. VW embodies German social capitalism like no other company,” said Klaus Dörre, a German sociologist specializing in right-wing populism and industrial transitions.
Unions and politicians are threatening resistance in case Blume goes through with his promised cuts.
“We will not agree to any strategy that presents plant closures and the reduction of industrial jobs as a supposedly easy solution,” said a spokesperson for Olaf Lies, the Social Democratic Party premier of Lower Saxony, where Volkswagen is headquartered.