A terrorist attack against the power supply for the Tesla factory paralyzed production a few weeks ago. Demonstrations and occupations of the planned site caused weeks of commotion before the factory was built. Tesla’s water consumption is also constantly brought up as a killer argument, even though other companies in the area use many times more water resources than the Americans. Every new Tesla project in Germany is publicly criticized and one wonders why Tesla does this to itself? Are they masochistic?
In other news, politicians, the media and the public are bemoaning the ongoing deindustrialization of Germany. A recent study by the German Economic Institute (IW) confirms a trend that has been ongoing for ten years, in which inflows, i.e. investments coming into Germany, are exceeded many times over by outflows, i.e. investments made abroad by domestic companies. The difference results in net outflows.
Inflows of 22 billion euros appear for 2023, but these lead to net outflows of 94 billion euros due to investments by domestic companies abroad. With the exception of the COVID year 2020, the net outflows between 2013 and 2023 were between 20 and 125 billion euros every year.
Christian Rusche, Senior Economist for Competition and Structural Change at IW Cologne and author of the study, no longer interprets it as an exceptional phenomenon, but as the first symptoms of deindustrialization. In fact, production in the manufacturing sector in December 2023 was significantly lower than in 2015.
We could now go on and on listing the reasons why Germany is in the midst of deindustrialization. The shrinking and ageing population, the excessive bureaucracy, the digital desert that is Germany, a population that is becoming increasingly hostile to technology and science, laws and regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation or the EU AI Act, which cause expense and uncertainty, a lack of political vision for a business location, complacency, arrogance and saturation on the part of German business leaders due to past successes or even the fear of change, which leads to counter-reactions or passivity towards innovations and necessary steps at all levels.
However, this is clearly manifested in Tesla. One of the most innovative companies of the last decade decides to place its trust in Germany and invest billions in a new production facility in the country, thereby creating tens of thousands of jobs and ensuring corresponding tax revenues and economic growth in the region, and what happens? People rise up from complaining about Germany’s economic decline and not only dump garbage on Tesla, but even get violent.
Even if it may only be a small minority, it is very vocal and the signal effect beyond Germany’s borders is conceivably bad. After all, Tesla is not just any company, but one that is the focus of international public attention due to its innovative strength and role in the disruption of mobility. The protests against Tesla in Germany are a warning to any other industrial company thinking of investing in Germany.
So what does Germany actually want?
It’s not a given that everyone excels at learning english language (required to act in Europe) or other languages (spanish, french, chinese) and is eager to compete on a global job market. Although the notion of “global thinking” and “local acting” is promoted for sustainable thinking understanding the positive impact of electric vehicles has not been easy in a country where both the car companies, the car owner lobbies and even the unions have ridiculed the electric vehicles for years for different reasons. Living in Germany I daily encounter how progress, development and most of all changes to the status quo are creating angst at a fundamental level in people. One thing that does not help is that the challenges are so big that people have a hard time finding a utopia that they can believe in. I think what some germans want is for those big problems to go away and to be able to think and act in a known way in a smaller world that they can understand. Ultimately it’s a problem of self-esteem.