Why financial experts should take a clear position against the AfD

Why financial experts should take a clear position against the AfD

According to a report by www.deutschlandfunk.de,

Sometimes silence can also be loud. For example, when it comes to clearly distinguishing yourself from the AfD and its right-wing radical positions. The silence of many business leaders is deafening. The way they shirk their social responsibility is both devastating and outrageous. They guarantee the financial existence of tens of thousands of employees. That's why what they think and say is important. Their silence harms the companies themselves.

Employers – and trade unions too – must take a clear position against right-wing populism and the partly extreme right-wing AfD; not just publicly, as Interior Minister Faeser is now rightly demanding, but above all in the company. It must be clear to every employee that they are choosing the AfD as a location risk for Germany - because it scares away foreign skilled workers and can endanger their own company's business models and profits.

Even a non-political managing director is interested in the success of his company. And the AfD is an anti-job party that tends towards protectionism, more nation states, high hurdles for free trade. Yes, where are the profits of German companies supposed to come from given this limited economic perspective? In addition, she wants to abolish the property tax, making 14 billion euros less for the state every year.

With all this, investing in the future is no longer an option. Prosperity for all that the AfD promises? Guaranteed not. No entrepreneur can take these AfD positions seriously. The party is an economic policy dud that business and society urgently need to defuse. But that takes courage.

It's better not to make a statement about the AfD

However, many companies prefer to ignore the business risk from the right. In the state elections in Hesse, the AfD recently achieved more than 18 percent. What do such results mean for companies and their dealings with the AfD? The business magazine Capital wanted to know this from 60 companies, including all DAX companies. The answers from the large corporations – a joke, because not even half of them answered at all. And this comes from companies of all companies that flood the media's email inboxes almost every day with soft PR statements. Messages on topics such as diversity or sustainable business are obviously more profitable for them than a statement against the AfD.

Racism increases the shortage of skilled workers

This belief is foolish, and it in no way speaks for the leadership skills of many managers. The economic situation is serious: companies in Germany are already regularly unable to fill more than half a million positions. Trend: rising. This affects tradesmen as well as the IT industry and construction electrical engineering. It is increasingly difficult for top international companies such as the chip manufacturer Infineon to convince good skilled workers from abroad to choose Germany as a location - also because of the racism that the AfD is fomenting.

If companies therefore lack employees who produce important components for future technologies, alarm bells should be ringing in the management ranks. The pessimists among them are already complaining that Europe is falling further and further behind the USA.

Finally, a glimmer of hope: In a survey by the employer-related IW Institute, many managing directors of employers and business associations said that the AfD is indeed an economic risk in the long term. Most often they worry about securing skilled workers and the existence of the euro and the EU. A third also see the AfD and its positions as a potential source of division within the workforce. If only more of them expressed these legitimate concerns, it would be an important sign.