3. September 2024
No matter what VW thinks and decides, the government is at the table. An anachronism at VW guarantees the country golden shares that cannot be outvoted. This is now becoming the next burden for Olaf Scholz.
Caught in the act, hung in the act: The announced wave of layoffs at VW, the unilateral termination of the employment guarantee and the threatened closure of the first plant in Germany can be written into the red debt book of the federal and state governments. And not only because their disastrous economic policy in Germany has now severely affected industry and all those to whom it provides work and a livelihood, but because VW has in fact been a state-owned company since it was founded in 1937.
Generations of managers, works councils and workers came and went through the gates of Wolfsburg and elsewhere, but the state, or more precisely the state of Lower Saxony, remained in the building as the most important shareholder. The state owns golden shares, an anachronism from times long past: a specially created VW law guarantees, against every rule in the EU, that the state can never be outvoted in any decisions affecting VW, no matter how large its share is.
And so it happens that the SPD not only governs the country, but also conveniently the largest company in the country, VW. No matter what is being thought, planned or decided at VW, Olaf Scholz is always at the table, or rather he is represented by his party colleague, the Prime Minister of Lower Saxony, Stephan Weil. Diesel scandal, constant managerial changes, software problems, a botched electric car strategy – the state has always been on board when things didn’t go as planned at VW. And it is also involved now when it comes to fewer VW employees and fewer VW plants in Germany.
Knowing, deciding, being caught, being hung is the whole misery that Volkswagen and connects the top representatives of this republic with each other. It is of no use to Scholz to point the finger at the managers who are announcing layoffs. He is one of them himself.
