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Connecting decision makers to a dynamic network of information, people and ideas, Bloomberg quickly and accurately delivers business and financial information, news and insight around the world
Americas+1 212 318 2000
EMEA+44 20 7330 7500
Asia Pacific+65 6212 1000
Workers outside changing facilities at RWE AG’s Hambach lignite mine in Niederzier, Germany, on Nov. 27.
Anxious working class is putting once-affluent areas in play for next month’s snap election.
At the Hambach open-pit mine on the edge of Germany’s former industrial heartland, the ground shakes as a giant wheel excavator that’s heavier than the Eiffel Tower chews through the landscape, digging up brown coal to power factories like a cluster of paper mills in nearby Düren.
In this small city of 90,000, 40 kilometers west of Cologne, Germany’s challenges collide and it’s in once-thriving places like Düren where the battle for Germany’s future is being fought. The political campaigns ahead of the snap Feb. 23 election will start in earnest this weekend when the ruling Social Democrats and the far-right Alternative for Germany — a rising force in the region — hold party conferences.
