Rehlinger doubts Ford's fair decision

Created: 06/22/2022, 12:22 p.m

Saarland Prime Minister Anke Rehlinger smiles.

© Harald Tittel/dpa/archive image

Saarland Prime Minister Anke Rehlinger (SPD) doubts that the Ford car company will make fair decisions about the future of the Ford plant in Saarlouis.

"Today I am firmly convinced that we have managed to put the better offer on the table," she said on Wednesday in the plenary session of the Saar state parliament.

She referred to the bidding competition organized by Ford between the Saarlouis site and Valencia, Spain, for the production of a new electric car.

Saarbrücken - If the decision by Ford management announced for Wednesday - as expected by experts - fails in Valencia, the future of a total of around 6000 jobs in Saarland from 2025 is uncertain.

Rehlinger said she had "doubts as to whether we were ever in this fair process," where profitability is really the key criterion.

The Saarland recently presented Ford with a "formulated, explained, concrete" package for the preservation of the Saarlouis location.

This was "on a scale closer to one billion than 500 million euros".

They also wanted to explain this package: "We just had the impression that sometimes nobody wanted to know.

I got the impression that people didn't want to hear exactly what we had in our luggage because it might interfere with prior decisions."

The prime minister regretted that Ford had not responded to the offer to have an independent economic institute calculate which location was the better one.

"I don't think that reflects well on the management, to say the least.

Because this actually leads to the assumption that this procedure was never fair.” It may have been a “sham procedure” in order to “legitimize a decision that had already been made in advance”.

Rehlinger emphasized that the government had always fought for jobs in Saarlouis.

"With pleasure and preferably with and at Ford. But if not Ford, then we still fight for these jobs, because the people remain the same." If it is no longer possible with Ford, then "we should not make ourselves small and should trust a lot for the future".

“It's safe to say that we're currently in a slightly more difficult stage.

But we have not reached the end of the question of whether structural change can be successfully implemented again in Saarland.” dpa