Forget the UK – regional elections tomorrow in Germany could have far- reaching implications for Angela Merkel, Europe and Greece. And crucial to the outcome is the country’s former industrial heartland, the Rhine-Ruhr
NECESSITY IS the mother of invention and in the German city of Duisburg, the cash-strapped local government has become outrageously inventive.
A pensioner group was the first to notice the chill in its local swimming pool: to save money, the water temperature has been reduced by two degrees and opening hours slashed. Now unblushing city councillors want to introduce a tax on the city’s 20 “pleasure locales” – sex clubs and brothels – of €2 per 10 sq m of floor space.
It’s a taste of things to come in Duisburg, and in the entire Rhine-Ruhr region. Now struggling, it was once the wealthiest region of Germany that, like Liverpool and Newcastle, grew rich on the industrial revolution spoils of steel and coal.
Mine shafts lined the horizon to power the steel mills of the Krupp family, the Ruhr’s uncrowned monarchs. The region was a magnet for workers and entrepreneurs from all over Europe, including Dubliner William Mulvany.
Born in 1806 in Sandycove to a family of artists – his father was a founder of the Royal Hibernian Academy – Thomas Mulvany was an engineer at heart. When he came to the Ruhr in 1855, he embraced new industrial technology quicker than established players to build up a network of highly profitable coal mines named after his homeland: Erin, Hibernia and Shamrock.
Long after his death in 1885, the mines continued operating as part of the Ruhr engine that, for more than a century, would churn out fuel and machines for the industrial revolution, and weapons for two World Wars.
But by the 1950s, cheap imported coal and gas triggered a decline that has yet to reach its nadir. Where once more than a million men worked in the Ruhr coal mines, today it’s just 10,000; the last mine is set to close in 2018 and just a handful of steel mills survive.
Like England’s northerners, the people of the Rhine-Ruhr region are a tough, straight-talking lot. But the hardships and humiliations of the past decades have sapped their confidence.
Duisburg begins like most Ruhr cities: ugly. Visitors leaving the train station get a blast of hot fat from the mobile sausage stand, mixed with exhaust fumes from the roaring autobahn below. The pigeon-plagued pedestrian zone is as generically West German as it gets, lined with functional 1960s buildings and stores that meet the needs of their elderly, cash-strapped customers: a hearing aid store, a discount bakery, and dozens of low-cost chain stores.
Even with its shiny new shopping centre – filled with more low-cost chain stores – it’s clear that Duisburg is struggling.
It has the kind of problems more readily associated with former East German cities, such as a rapidly greying population of half a million that has shrunk by a fifth in the past 30 years.
The city finances are a mess: with a jobless rate of 13 per cent, twice the national average, dole payments swallow the lion’s share of Duisburg’s budget. The local business tax take, the city’s main source of income, has collapsed by 50 per cent in the past year to just €110 million.
The city hasn’t balanced its books in 20 years, thanks in part to Germany’s 1990 unification deal that so far has obliged Duisburg to transfer to eastern states a total of €570 million – all of which is borrowed money.
“It’s clear we can’t afford any of this: we should be the ones getting financial support,” says Josip Sosic, a city hall spokesman. “But Duisburg lies on the wrong side of the former German border.”
The easiest way to get a grip on the size of Germany’s Rhine-Ruhr area is to think of Los Angeles, and double it. With nine million people in 7,000 sq km, the region bounded by the Rhine and Ruhr rivers is an endless, disorienting sprawl intersected by an autobahn, where one city runs into the next. Dortmund, Duisburg and Düsseldorf pass in a blur with Essen, Bochum and Gelsenkirchen.
After the war, the Allies lumped the Ruhr in with other former independent regions and kingdoms to create the massive state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) that today is home to 18 million people, more than the neighbouring Netherlands.
When voters here speak, German politicians listen. Five years ago, NRW voters ousted the ruling Social Democrats after an incredible 40 years in power, setting in motion a chain of events that toppled the then chancellor Gerhard Schröder.
Now his successor, Angela Merkel, is watching nervously: if voters oust her Christian Democrat (CDU) allies from the state parliament in Düsseldorf tomorrow, she loses her political majority in Berlin’s upper house of parliament and, with it, her ability to govern effectively. And in the closely-knit eurozone, a lame-duck government in Berlin has consequences for everyone.
THE ELECTION has come at the worst possible moment for Merkel: despite her best efforts to stall, circumstances forced her to push through Germany’s €22 billion loan package to Greece yesterday, just 48 hours before the NRW poll.
In cities such as Duisburg, where one arm is already being tapped to fund its eastern cousins, people resent having to open a vein in the other arm to support distant, spend-thrift strangers.
Not even a swim in the chilly city pool can cool tempers here. If anything, the Greek deal is just one more reason why many people here won’t bother voting tomorrow. The other reason is a growing feeling of helplessness amid the chilly winds of globalisation.
Down the road from Duisburg in Düsseldorf, Frank Rabes downs an after-work beer in the Schlössel pub and tells how one friend after another in the steel industry lost their jobs in the past decade.
“Now they hire unskilled workers for €6.50 an hour, teach them to do one thing and call themselves services companies,” says the 50- year-old metalworker, who is dressed head-to-toe in denim.
With its huge working-class population, the Ruhr was once a stronghold of Social Democrat (SPD) voters. Rabes says he’s an SPD voter at heart, but like many here he has no interest in voting. The forces at work, squeezing his quality of life, are beyond the control of any political party, he says.
“The politicians just smooth the way: hire-fire laws are loosened up and wages are slashed, all in the name of greater flexibility,” says the Düsseldorf native. “This used to be a steel city, but now it’s an office city just like any other.”
After years of decline, a huge Ruhr rescue effort is under way – with an uncertain outcome. As the area is a European capital of culture in 2010, the state government hopes to change how locals and visitors view the region, away from an industrial and towards a cultural metropole.
BUT CULTURE cannot hope to fill the gaping hole left in the economy by steel and coal. That role has fallen to Duisport, Europe’s largest inland harbour, outside Duisburg.
Built a century ago for the industrial age, the massive area of cranes, container ships and warehouses on the Rhine River has transformed itself into a highly profitable logistics hub. Some 110 million tonnes of cargo pass through here annually, where the water hub linking Hamburg and Rotterdam meets the rail hub between the Benelux countries and eastern Europe. Some 36,000 jobs have been created through Duisport in the past decade, and the facility is struggling to keep up with demand for its services.
“The transformation of the region is well under way, though cliches about the Ruhr smokestacks and pollution persist,” says Jan Boruszewski, the head of Duisport corporate development. “But people here in the Ruhr are used to knuckling down and aren’t afraid of hard work.” Once, in the industrial age, Germany’s Ruhr region got the world moving. Now, in the globalised age, its ambition is to keep the world moving.
