Germany

Facing a prolonged energy crisis, many German firms face the unpleasant option of either shutting down or relocating elsewhere.

FRANKFURT — Is this the beginning of the end for German industry?

Europe’s manufacturing powerhouse is set to scrape by this winter thanks to gas reserves built up over the last eight months, avoiding an energy blackout.

But a darker scenario lurks just over the horizon, as high energy prices and lower gas reserves could conspire to trigger a wave of shutdowns among mid-sized companies unable to weather the storm as larger firms with deeper pockets seek safer economic ground in other countries.

Pressure is piling on Olaf Scholz as manufacturing industry pays the price for energy shortages

Few of the 34,000 inhabitants in Saarlouis can remember what it was like before the Ford plant opened on the outskirts of town.

The carmaker has been one of the largest employers in Saarland – a tiny German region on the border with France – for 50 years. Its presence has been a source of well-paid jobs and local pride.

“I convinced my whole family to buy our cars. My cousin bought a Ford, my brother bought a Ford, my father bought a Ford. I even talked my wife who was then my girlfriend into buying a Ford,” says 31-year-old Michael Bartuew.

The worst nightmares of Europe’s sleeping giant are coming true all at once

Being a Germany watcher in the early 21st century can often feel like being an expert on ancient Greece: You kind of missed all the exciting bits. Alas, that seems to be changing. At the same time an economic cyclone is threatening to wreck one of the world’s more deceptively combustible societies, Germany is also emerging as the fulcrum of Vladimir Putin’s strategy to salvage his war in Ukraine by breaking Western solidarity—a gambit that now involves a credible nuclear weapons threat. For a country with an almost uniquely pathological fear of inflationary shocks, populist politics, and nuclear technology, the winter of 2022 is shaping up to be a horror show.

BERLIN — The German government on Thursday declassified a top-secret security assessment on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from 2021, only four months before the outbreak of war, which claimed energy supplies “won’t be jeopardized” by increased dependency on Russian gas.

The document, dated October 26, 2021, was adopted in the final days of former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s outgoing government, in which Germany’s current leader Olaf Scholz played a key role as vice chancellor.