Tesla's shadow Quiet corner of Germany once welcomed its giant factory - not any more

When Elon Musk urged German voters to back the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) last year, one resident of the town where the billionaire has built Tesla's European production hub complained to the state premier.

- Kate Connolly

"How can you do business with someone who supports rightwing extremism?" Manu Hoyer asked Dietmar Woidke, the leader of the eastern state of Brandenburg, who backed the setting up of the Tesla "gigafactory" in Grünheide.

When she got a response from the Social Democrat, Hoyer called it "disappointing, but predictable". She told the Guardian: "He said he didn't know him personally. As if that excused him."

When Musk's plans for the town were announced in 2019, Hoyer co-founded a campaign to oppose them. She was not alone in fearing the environmental impact on the sparsely populated region's pine forests and groundwater, but gave little thought to Musk's politics.

More recently, however, Musk has not only used his high profile to back far-right European parties, but also seemed to make two Nazi salutes at a rally to mark the return of Donald Trump as US president.

In Europe especially, Tesla sales have since slumped - falling for five months in a row - despite overall growth in the electric car market. In Grünheide, the local press has reported how unsold Teslas have been moved en masse to a nearby former airport, left to bake in the sun, parked alongside solar panels and hidden by trees.

Heiko Baschin, one of Hoyer's fellow campaigners, admitted to a certain amount of schadenfreude as he kept up with Tesla's rapidly changing fortunes. "We put our hopes in this," he said.

As the company's sales have declined, so the gigafactory has suffered. Workers manufacturing the Y-Model have seen their shift pattern cut from three per day to two, and the trade union IG Metall - which has hundreds of members at the plant, despite resistance from Tesla - has urged bosses to adopt a "kurzarbeit" scheme.

Such a programme, designed for downturns, sees workers cut their hours in the short term and top up their income with a government allowance. Designed to avoid job losses, kurzarbeit is used by many of Germany's troubled carmakers.