Brett Neely

For much of the past year, I’ve been covering the soap opera that is GM‘s troubled European unit, Opel for pretty much every outlet I’ve worked for, including Marketplace, NPR and Deutsche Welle. Now that GM has agreed to sell a controlling stake to Magna, it looks like everything I reported would be a problem with the deal has come true.

The Antwerp factory I visited appears to be on the chopping block, despite being one of Opel’s most efficient production locations according to union leaders. In the zero-sum terms of today’s car business, axing Antwerp means saving German factories (and jobs in a German election season). Indeed, just 4,000 jobs will probably be cut in Germany, less than expected earlier this summer.

Oh right, the German government is underwriting the Magna deal and got testy about funding other bidders when it became clear that they would lay off more German workers.

Belgium, along with Spain and the UK, which all have Opel factories likely to be closed or heavily cut, are…upset. And they’re going to the European Commission and trying to sink the deal now that it’s official and the layoff negotiations are underway.

As for the workers and retirees I spoke to in Antwerp over the summer, they were sanguine then about what could happen but I suspect they’re worried now. My inbox has been getting multiple press releases a day about demonstrations and protests. Ultimately though, the only hope those workers have is if the EU puts the screws on Germany in the next few months. Otherwise, at least they have a European-style safety net to fall back on rather than wind up in the European equivalent of Detroit.