The threat of Thyssenkrupp shedding thousands of steel jobs in Germany’s most populous state is turning into a campaign issue less than two weeks before the biggest electoral test heading into the national vote in September.
With polls suggesting the Social Democratic Party at risk of losing its governing majority in a vote in North-Rhine Westphalia on May 14, local leaders from the SPD and Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union are jockeying to defend the country’s steel workers.
Thyssenkrupp, formed in 1999 through the merger of two iconic German companies, has been caught up in the political spotlight as it tries to restructure its steel operations in response to a global glut depressing steel prices. Unions oppose that effort, which they say will result in more than 4,000 job loses, as well as a proposal to merge the operations with Tata Steel.
“I don’t want to imagine what will happen when the decisions are no longer discussed in German but rather in English, and when the decisions are not made in Essen or Duisburg but instead in London, the Netherlands or Mumbai,” Garrelt Duin, NRW’s Social Democratic economy minister, said at a rally Wednesday outside Thyssenkrupp’s plant in Duisburg, Europe’s largest steel production site. “And that is why we do not want this solution,” he said of the proposed merger.
While Merkel defends the free trade that benefits German exports, the country’s shrinking steel industry, which has shed two-thirds of its jobs in the last four decades, shows how advocating for globalization can be a double-edged sword, even in a nation where unemployment is at a record post-reunification low.
The fate of Thyssenkrupp’s 22,000 steel workers in the state - Germany’s traditional industrial heartland and home to Bayer, Deutsche Telekom, Deutsche Post and all of Germany’s biggest utilities - is of particular concern for State Prime Minister Hannelore Kraft, whose SPD has close union ties and needs their backing to win another term.
“Kraft needs to show solidarity and have our backs and fight with us for the future of steel-making at Thyssenkrupp,” Wilhelm Segerath, the company’s top labour leader, said in a phone interview. “The merger should be buried. Thyssenkrupp can develop better on its own and to do that we need the support of politicians.”
 The most recent poll in NRW, as the state is called, showed the SPD’s support declining to 35% and the CDU rising to 29% - cutting nearly in half what was an 11 percentage point gap in March. The CDU, led in the state by Armin Laschet, sees an opening to unseat Kraft, who has run NRW since 2010. The party says she’s hamstrung because she currently governs with the pro-environment Greens, and argues that the CDU would do more to prioritise the steel industry.
“We would speak with a much clearer voice for this industry and intervene in a different way in Brussels and Berlin,” Hendrik Wuest, the CDU’s spokesman for economic policy in the state parliament, said in a phone interview. “Employment in the steel industry itself is at stake and the long value chain that depends on it.”
The SPD is fighting to retain control of a state that it’s governed for nearly the entire time since its creation after World War II. One blip in that continuous control was in 2005, when the CDU won the state, prompting then-SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder to call an early national election that brought Merkel to power. Federal Labor Minister Andrea Nahles and Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel, both members of the SPD, have attended rallies in recent months at the plant calling for the protection of the company’s steel industry.
With such a big prize on the line and implications at the national level, Merkel is campaigning in the state on Thursday and her challenger for the chancellorship, Martin Schulz, is visiting as well. 
North Rhine-Westphalia is home to more than 20% of the German population and is larger than the Netherlands, its western neighbour. 
It has a gross domestic product of almost €650bn ($710bn), making the state comparable in GDP terms to Switzerland or Turkey.
Employees at Essen-based Thyssenkrupp oppose the talks that started last year to create a joint venture with Tata, which they see as a possible precursor to site closures and an eventual exit from steel altogether by chief executive officer Heinrich Hiesinger, who is shifting to a more diversified industrial group.