Trouble In The Heartland

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Last may Angela Teusch walked into Duisburg's central train station, where she works as a cleaner, to find her co-workers slack-jawed with incredulity. They were staring at a fresh crop of campaign posters plastered on the station's walls. They portrayed her husband, Wolfgang, a steelworker and union shop steward at ThyssenKrupp Stahl, in his silver blast-furnace smock and hard hat. The real surprise was not the larger-than-life apparition of Herr Teusch and his frayed walrus moustache, but the poster's message: an endorsement from this lifelong Social Democrat of the opposition Christian Democratic Union (cdu). "Did you see the poster? How can anyone who works at Thyssen join that party?" Angela says, recalling the outrage of her colleagues that day. As she draws on a cigarette in her sparsely furnished kitchen, the wiry redhead repeats her response: "I told them, I don't need to see the poster. I've got the original at home."

Wolfgang may be the original, but he's by no means the only steelworker to convert to the cdu. The spd lags behind the cdu in the run-up to next week's state elections; the most recent poll gives the cdu a six-point lead in a region where the spd has reigned supreme for nearly 40 years. And if more people like Wolfgang make the switch, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's fragile spd–Green coalition could fall apart at next year's national vote. "People here are just frustrated and want to see new faces," says Wolfgang, sniffing a pinch of red tobacco. "My grandpa used to say that the spd gave us prosperity after the war. That may be true, but they can't do it anymore."

In the past, North Rhine–Westphalia, in which Duisburg is located, has been an spd stronghold, where no-nonsense blue-collar workers like Teusch rebuilt the city from the bombed-out ruins of World War II, turning it into Europe's biggest steel producer. But now Duisburg is a shadow of the boomtown it once was. A light smell of sulphur still fills the air, recalling times when steel mills lined the edge of the city. But today, many mills have shut down. Last year, the number of steelworkers in Germany plunged to 78,000 — nearly half of whom live in Duisburg — from 297,000 in 1960. Unemployment runs at 18%, well above the national average of 11.8%.

The spd blames ruthless capitalists; party chairman Franz Müntefering accused foreign investors of stripping assets and ignoring the human cost in jobs and livelihoods (see sidebar). North Rhine–Westphalia's spd governor Peer Steinbrück joined the chorus during a debate with his rival, cdu candidate Jürgen Rüttgers: "I expect companies that are making record profits to create jobs." But locals blame the spd. When Müntefering addressed around 1,000 Duisburg workers on May Day, they pelted him with eggs as he stood behind a line of policemen protecting him with riot shields. "This campaign is really fun," the cdu's Rüttgers told a rally last week. "It's nice to have a tailwind for once." A cdu victory in North Rhine–Westphalia could be the clearest sign yet that Germans are ready for a change of leadership in Berlin.