The US car manufacturer Ford will not build its first fully self-developed electric car in Saarlouis, Saarland.

Instead, according to information from the Spanish newspaper "El Pais", the group's management has opted for production in Valencia, Spain.

Bernd Freytag

Business correspondent Rhein-Neckar-Saar based in Mainz.

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Hans Christian Roessler

Political correspondent for the Iberian Peninsula and the Maghreb based in Madrid.

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After months of wrangling, in which the board of directors, to the great displeasure of employees and politicians, called on the plants to engage in a kind of internal competition and to compete for subsidies, the Saarlanders apparently left the field as losers.

The plant with its 4,600 employees and the surrounding supplier park with a further 1,300 employees are threatened with significant cuts, perhaps closure.

The Ford Focus will be produced there until 2025, after which an employment guarantee will expire.

In the auto industry, a plant without its own model is considered threatened with closure in the long term.

Ford only agreed to evaluate options for future concepts.

Prime Minister Anke Rehlinger (SPD) said that the aid package was “closer to one billion euros than 500 million euros”.

The government on the Saar has coordinated closely with the federal government

Economics Minister Jürgen Barke, who flew with Prime Minister Rehlinger to Ford headquarters in Dearborn at the beginning of June to promote Saarlouis, said recently that the package contained “everything that is legally possible.

This goes to the limits of what is economically affordable and politically justifiable".

The country put it together “in close coordination” with the Federal Chancellery.

As early as 1998, when it came to the order for the Focus production, the state government had paid 100 million euros in aid.

The decision would be a heavy blow for the small federal state.

The car industry first came to Saarland with Ford.

Federal Chancellor Ludwig Erhard advocated the settlement at the end of the 1960s in order to give the youngest federal state further economic prospects.

Incorporated late into the Federal Republic, the country got nothing from the distribution of lucrative federal agencies.

The coal crisis was already omnipresent, and in the 1960s half of the mines at the time were closed.

In fact, the auto industry has become a stable anchor.

Since the start of production in 1970, more than 15 million cars have rolled off the assembly line: Escort, Capri, Fiesta, since 1998 and until 2025: the Focus.

Many of the suppliers depend on the combustion engine

The supply chain for the automotive industry that has developed over time has risen to become the most important industry and has compensated for a large part of the structural breaks caused by the loss of coal mining and the severely decimated steel industry.

However, many of the suppliers depend on the combustion engine: ZF Friedrichshafen alone employs 9,000 people in the Saarbrücken plant in transmission construction.

The Bosch works in Homburg, where more than 4000 people work, are more or less dependent on diesel technology.

Instead, Ford wants to significantly upgrade its German headquarters in Cologne, where 15,000 people work, and has already announced investments of over 2 billion euros there in the coming years.

Two new models are planned on a Volkswagen platform, as well as a battery assembly plant.

In Valencia, Ford no longer wants to use the VW platform, but instead use its own base for the first time.