400 people are out of work after a chemical plant in Saxony-Anhalt shut its doors, and the timing is brutal: the AfD had just won in that same region. Back earlier this year, the state put up roughly €80 million to keep emergency operations running. That money couldn't stop what came next. Investor talks fell apart when gas prices climbed again. The company had already been through insolvency once because of gas costs, and survived. Then the Iran war sent prices up another notch, and this time there was no cushion left. Everyone who'd been considering putting money in walked away. What would've actually helped? A pipeline deal with locked-in rates that doesn't get yanked around every time something blows up somewhere in the world. Some kind of steady supply coming from the north. Because this plant was designed around cheap gas from the start. It wasn't just powering the equipment. The gas was the raw material for chemicals too, fertilizer being the big one. So that's another factory dark in Germany, and one less fertilizer producer left standing in Europe.