Can Unions Stop The Far Right?

If it weren’t for working-class voters, Germany’s recent election could have been a lot worse.

- Vauhini Vara

NOT LONG AGO, Yasin Günay overheard colleagues at the steel company where he works, Hüttenwerke Krupp Mannesmann, in Duisburg, Germany, complaining bitterly about immigration. Chancellor Angela Merkel had accepted hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers the previous year, and with the right-wing Alternative for Germany party stirring up ugly stereotypes, anti-immigration talk had intensified throughout the country. As Günay, a child of Turkish immigrants, stood by, his colleagues— rank-and-file workers like himself— egged each other on. One of them remarked that if someone would just cut a hole in one of the refugees’ boats, they’d have a thousand fewer problems.

Günay is even- tempered, but he felt like shouting. Instead, he says, he broke up the gathering and asked everyone to reconvene in half an hour for an honest, objective discussion about immigration. That his colleagues showed up—and that, over time, Günay changed the way some of them viewed the issue—reveals a lot about why Merkel remains the chancellor of Germany.

I met Günay during a visit to the western Ruhr region in September, just before the German election. I’d traveled there because it most resembles the states responsible for tilting the U.S. election in Donald Trump’s favor—an industrial area known for producing coal and steel. In recent years, it has faced familiar troubles. Most of its coal mines have shuttered, and steelworkers have come under pressure from automation and Chinese competition.