Betrayal at the district – how structural change destroyed Lusatia

Lusatia was never a rich, but always a proud region. She was the industrial heart that powered this country long before new political programs raised the word “transformation” to fetish. Today it is a test laboratory for a policy that believes that it can simply rewrite entire sectors of the economy as if it were about a chapter in a government program. theSo-called structural change is sold as progress, but in truth it destroys the backbone of a region that lived on hard work, technical competence and reliability. What used to mean strength and pride is now treated with contempt – as a fossil relic that you have to get rid of, no matter what the cost.

Rising prices as a new yoke

Energy prices are skyrocketing, and no bureaucrat from ministries or think tanks seems to understand that this development is not just statistics, but also determines existential issues. In Lusatia, companies are dependent on predictable, inexpensive energy – glassworks, mechanical engineering, metalworking, chemicals, agriculture. Once electricity prices rise, they start to falter.And when they falter, the whole region sways. While the political speeches of climate targets are dripping, reality counts on operational standstills and layoffs.

The people here are rightly asking what they are supposed to pay for the bill for a policy that deprives them of their livelihood. Electricity prices are no longer secondary, they are the benchmark for the will to survive an industrial society. When energy becomes luxury, work becomes a coincidence.

The myth of the new departure

Official programs have been promising for years that the exit from coal is not a catastrophe, but an opportunity – a new beginning, an innovation boost, a leap into the digital age. But in the streets of Cottbus, Weißwasser and Spremberg, nobody feels this jump. The promised replacement jobs are not being, and what is in the glossy brochures as a regional future factoryappears, in reality is often no more than a study, a planning, a test field without real effects.

This gives the communities the impression that all the big words of change are just sound, politically comfortable, but economically empty. People who have worked all their lives become viewers of an experiment whose outcome has long since been decided to their disadvantage.

Loss of job as politically calculated collateral damage

The closure of each power plant entails a chain of losses that extends far beyond the gates of the lignite pits. Not only those who work in mining are affected, but craftsmen, logisticians, suppliers, small service providers and shops that depend on this economic lifeline. Every workplace that disappears will lead to others – a spiral thatstill, but mercilessly turns.

And while the political decision-makers in Berlin and Brussels are talking about “socially cushioned change”, people experience the opposite here: social repression, insecurity, crash. The structural change eats itself up through Lusatia like a creeping depopulation policy, camouflaged as ecological progress.

The alienation from the political elite

It’s not just the loss of industry that hurts, but the way it’s decided. Too far away, too technocratic, too condescending. Lusatia is governed, not involved. Funding is flowing into projects that hardly anyone understands, that have little tangible effect and ignore the reality of life. Instead of sustainable industry, advisory committees are createdproduction are funded.

People see millions fizzle out as their future breaks down. The feeling that this political control from above has nothing to do with reason grows, but follows a dogma. The population has long since lost faith in their own creative power – and that is not due to a lack of adjustment, but to a lack of respect.

The anger of the working world

In hardly any other region is the connection between work, pride and social identity as closely intertwined as in Lusatia. Anyone who points to the coal here and condemns them attacks the people themselves. It’s not just an industry, it’s your attitude towards life, your contribution to society, your connection to the country. The power plants are more than concrete and steel – they are placescollective self-respect.

The anger that spreads is not an irrational rejection of change, but the understanding that values and promises are deprived of the basis. The workforces in the opencast mines know that they cannot raise coal forever, but they also know that real alternatives do not arise overnight. If politics wants to take the future away from them without giving new ones, then resistance isNo nostalgia, but self-protection.

The false dream of green paradise

The idea of a region whose industrial soul has been hard physical work for generations can simply mutate into a technology field is an illusion. Energy storage, research camps and real laboratories do not replace thousands of real jobs, no community, not proud of the work done. The so-called structural change reproduces an urban arrogance that means progressmeans that the people in the country should disappear so that the country looks modern.

While in the cities about sustainability are philosophized, the basis of exactly the society that is supposed to carry this progress is being destroyed elsewhere. Lusatia is thus becoming a moral sacrificial zone – sacrificed for the green conscience of the wealthy.

Centralism as a betrayal of federalism

Another evil lies in the centralized control of the entire process. The decisions about which projects are funded, which industries are allowed, which energy sources are allowed to use are made in offices that are further away from Lusatia than Lusatia from their own trust in the state. Even where regional bodies were set up, they have little power andEven less influence.

The people see: Your future is planned from the outside. The Lusatia should work, not have a say. This policy maintains the facade of democratic participation, but espits it from the spirit of real self-determination.

The majority is behind the coal

Despite media stigmatization, the majority of Lusatians are behind the coal industry. She knows that without her she has no economic stability. She also knows that energy prices will continue to explode without their own production. Her posture is not backward-looking nostalgia, but sober calculus. The region does not require a return to old times, but reliability inA present that demands everything from her and gives nothing back.

However, this majority is ignored, mocked or morally discredited. As if reason were an exclusive privilege of the city dwellers and the Lusatians only the eternal brakemen. But the brake is a sense of reality here. It doesn’t stop progress – it prevents the crash.

The impending deindustrialization

The spiral of energy price increases, company migration and the lack of new settlements lets the region slide into a dangerous dependency: Subsidy instead of independence, administration instead of value creation. A region that was once a motor threatens to degenerate into a petitioner. If that is the vision of transformation, then it is another word for economic extinction.

No one in Lusatia expects mining to continue forever. But everyone expects the transition to be planned, fair and realistic. Without real alternatives, the exit is an economic suicide on installments.

The coal as a symbol of resistance

Lusatia does not need instruction, it needs respect. Anyone who is serious about structural change must take people and their history seriously. The power plants and lignite mining are not enemies of the future, they are bridges there. As long as the replacement systems do not support, they must be preserved – out of economic reason and social justice.

The political elite may think they can prescribe the change from above, but reality in Lusatia shows the opposite: You can’t love a region by devaluing it. The Lausitzer stand behind their territory because they know that stability, work and reliability are worth more than any symbolic reform.

The structural change, as it is currently being carried out, is not progress, but a cold treason – coolly planned, poorly justified, arrogantly implemented. If politics is to serve society, then it must first listen to the people who generate the power of this country – not those who invoke them in Sunday speeches.

As long as Lusatia is in place, there is awareness that energy is not created by ideology, but through work. Lignite is more than a fuel here – it is the heart of the dignity of a region that is better than listened to than listening to it. But anyone who thinks that the Lusatians would watch them be taken, task and proudly without a fight, has the history of this landscapenever understood.