US on Opel

White House Deputy Spokesman Bill Burton said that the Obama administration will not get involved in pressuring General Motors to make a decision on the future of Opel.

"The President's view is that decision made about the day-to-day operations at General Motors should be made by the folks at General Motors," said Burton.

The US government has a majority stake in GM after the company declared bankruptcy in June.

Meanwhile, Opel's labor leaders are losing patience with the German carmaker's parent company GM.

Opel's labor leader Klaus Franz has promised protests if General Motors does not make a decision soon over Opel's future. GM had said it would decide Opel's fate last week, but the decision has been delayed indefinitely.

Franz said that the labor people have kept quiet until now, but that foot dragging by General Motors in Detroit can only go on for so long.

"We've completely run out of patience. In the past we stayed very calm and confined ourselves to listening to what the negotiating partners had to tell us," said Klaus. "But that's over now."

GM was to have made a decision on the fate of Opel on Friday August 21, but that decision was delayed.

Chancellor Angela Merkel, in a televised interview on Monday, urged the US administration to pressure GM to make a decision. Her Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier made a similar appeal in a note to his couterpart Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

On the other hand there are those who counsel against pushing the US administration too hard. Both the president of the American Chamber of Commerce Fred Irwin and Juergen Reinholz, the economics minister of the German state of Thuringia, have said that pushing Washington too hard on Opel may result in a cooling of US-German relations.

Of course, why GM is taking so long is the question that is on everyone's mind.

Theories abound

The biggest theory, of course, is that GM does not want to divest itself of Opel or that it has no intention of letting Opel go. Armin Schild, a representative of Germany's metalworkers union believes that GM has serious doubts about selling Opel Europe. But, he maintains that GM has to get rid of Opel because GM won't have the resources to focus on the development of environmentally friendly cars.

"Co-operating with Magna would mean forging an alliance with a partner which offers decisive technological expertise. Opel has to find a way of seeking an alliiance which makes it fit for tough global competition, and to do this it has to be as independent from GM as possible," said Schild.

In an interview in the Tageschau website, automotive expert Professor Willi Diez also theorizes that GM does not want to let Opel go.

"GM has one big problem, they really want the Belgian investor RHJ International to take over Opel, because that is the only way that GM will be able to buy Opel back in the future. However, the German government has guaranteed 4.5 billion euros of credit if GM lets Opel to to Magna. GM's leadership is now faced with a dilemma and must consider which of the two options is the lesser evil of the two," said Diez.

Either way, it is most likely that there will be no movement on the Opel situation until the GM board meets again on September 8 or 9.

Hardy Graupner/av/dpa
Editor: Trinity Hartman