JENA – When electrical engineer Preetam Gaikwad moved to Jena in 2013, she was excited by what the eastern German city had to offer: a renowned university, world-class research facilities and cutting-edge technology companies that are world leaders in their fields.

Eleven years later, the Indian-born man sees things more soberly.

“I am really worried about the development of the political situation here,” said Gaikwad, 43. Jena is in the eastern German state of Thuringia, where elections will be held on September 1.

The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is currently leading the polls with around 30 percent approval, far ahead of the center-right Christian Democrats (21 percent) and the center-left Social Democrats of Chancellor Olaf Scholz (7 percent).

The AfD’s xenophobic stance is a cornerstone of its campaign and is raising concerns among companies such as Jenoptik, Gaikwad’s employer. The company, which supplied lens assemblies for Perseverance, NASA’s remote-controlled Mars vehicle, employs 1,680 people in Jena and more than 4,600 worldwide.

Jenoptik, one of the few internationally successful companies in Jena, is dependent on attracting and retaining highly qualified workers – many of them from abroad. The rise of the AfD is making this more difficult, says Jenoptik CEO Stefan Traeger.

More and more potential employees are telling Traeger that while they would like to work at Jenoptik, they would not accept a job there because they do not want to live in a country dominated by a far-right party that excludes migrants or other minorities such as members of the LGBTQI+ community.

Traeger, a native of Jena who studied in the United States, told AP he hopes that after the election “we will still be as open, free and democratic a country as we are now. That’s what we need to move the company forward.”

———

This article, supported by the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, is part of an ongoing Associated Press series on threats to democracy in Europe.

———

Germany already suffers from a massive shortage of skilled workers. Experts estimate that the country needs around 400,000 skilled immigrants each year as its workforce ages and shrinks. Germany has long been considered Europe’s economic powerhouse, but was recently ranked as the world’s worst-performing major industrial nation by the International Monetary Fund.

Thuringia is one of Germany’s poorest states, a legacy of communist rule in the former GDR from 1949 to 1990. Salaries are below average and there are few large employers outside the public sector. Most young people, especially women, leave the country to seek their fortunes elsewhere. It is a brain drain to the wealthier west that began in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall and has not stopped since.

The rise of the AfD was aided by high inflation and immigration. In 2023, 1.9 million new residents came to Germany, while 1.2 million left the country permanently, representing a net migration of 663,000. While only a minority settle in the poorer eastern German states, anti-immigration sentiment is strong.

The AfD offshoot in Thuringia is particularly radical: its state chairman Björn Höcke described the Holocaust memorial in Berlin as a “monument of shame” and called for a “180-degree turn” in Germany’s memory of its own past, including the Nazis. In 2020, the AfD offshoot was officially monitored by the German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution as a “proven right-wing extremist” group.

In Thuringia’s towns and villages, AfD election posters are emblazoned with the slogan “Summer, sun, emigration” and a photo of an airplane that has been dubbed the “deportation plane” and is supposed to fly out all those people that the party and its voters do not want in Germany.

Nevertheless, in an interview with AP, the AfD tried to downplay the issue, which it prefers to call “remigration.”

Remigration refers to “people who have no right to stay and no prospect of staying in this country because they do not have protection status, because there is no reason for their flight or migration in the sense of the applicable laws,” said Torben Braga, deputy state chairman of the AfD Thuringia and member of the Thuringian state parliament.

Migrants with work permits are “of course not affected,” he said.

The experience of Gaikwad, a legal migrant, is very different. The racism she experiences is sometimes subtle, sometimes overt discrimination, but always hurtful and humiliating.

Like the supermarket cashier who bags up groceries for all the other customers and wishes them a nice day, only to then wordlessly slam Gaikwad’s bag next to her shopping.

Or the elderly neighbor who greets her in German and who stops her one day and says: “I find it uncomfortable to see so many people with strange skin and hair color here in Jena.”

The biggest shock for Gaikwad was when she went to the playground with her now ten-year-old daughter and heard a little German boy tell her that he would make a body powder for her “so that you can become a normal person again”.

The AfD is particularly popular in rural areas; in Thuringia, that is 70 percent of the population, says Axel Salheiser, research director at the Institute for Democracy and Civil Society in Jena.

“Even if there are no majorities so far, there are significant minorities who vote for the AfD, either to express their protest or to openly represent an anti-immigration and anti-liberal stance,” he told AP.

According to Salheiser, this means that Thuringia as a business location will not only make migrant workers think twice about moving there. “Potential investors will also ask themselves whether they want to locate their company or branch here.”

“It is a major problem for the region if the impression arises that significant parts of the population not only tolerate but even support anti-immigration and anti-diversity positions,” he added.

A recent survey by the German Economic Institute among more than 900 German companies also found that a majority sees the AfD as a risk – both for securing skilled workers and for investments in the region.

Last year, companies and individuals founded “Kosmopolitan Thuringia”, a grassroots network to promote tolerance, diversity and “indivisible human rights”, which now has more than 7,940 members.

This is also the case with Jenoptik, which specifically promotes the diversity of its workforce and presents its foreign employees on posters at its Jena headquarters.

Gaikwad says Jenoptik’s open-mindedness, her great job and the support of friends are what keep her in Jena, despite the racism she and her family have experienced.

“I have great faith in democracy and in the goodness of people,” she said.

Jenoptik CEO Traeger is grateful for Gaikwad and every other international employee he can keep in Jena.

“We need employees with creative potential. We Thuringians are a creative bunch, but we won’t be able to do it all alone,” said Traeger. “We also need people who come from other parts of the world, who may have different views, different beliefs, a different skin color or whatever.”

___

Kerstin Sopke and Pietro De Cristofaro contributed to the reporting.