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Strategic dilemma for StuttgartBy CNN's Charles Hodson Charles Hodson is traveling around Germany by train to test the mood of business people, trade unionists and ordinary voters ahead of Sunday's election.  Stuttgart is home to engineering giants such as DaimlerChrysler. SPECIAL REPORT
YOUR E-MAIL ALERTSSTUTTGART, Germany (CNN) -- It's breakfast time, and I'm heading south for one of Germany's most prosperous cities. Stuttgart is where my wife is from, so I'm combining business with pleasure and dropping in on my brother-in-law and his family. Thomas Bernhardt and his French wife, Cathie, have bought their own house outside Stuttgart, the country's traditional engineering heartland and home to such companies as DaimlerChrysler, Porsche and Bosch. Thomas is 40, a middle manager and engineer at a big-name German company. He and Cathie have three children: David, who's 11; Marla, who's 9; and Philipp, the baby, who's just 9 months. Thomas tells me his main task these days is developing products that are better than Chinese imports. "In my industry-watching, China is key because they can manufacture so many things at prices we just can't match," he says. "We have to do something." On the election he thinks the two main parties aren't that far apart. It's more a question of the right personality. "What Mr. Schroeder has done was not easy, getting started on the kind of reform that runs counter to his party's traditions," Thomas says. But is that enough, or is a more drastic approach needed? "I think we need to take a more radical approach, and that means a party that has the parliamentary muscle to push through its program," he says. "The SPD has clearly failed there." So will he vote for Schroeder or his challenger, Angela Merkel? "You should boil it down to the old question: 'Would you buy a used car from this person?' "This is my dilemma: I would trust Merkel more -- I'd find her more honest, without suggesting that Schroeder is dishonest. But I wouldn't be confident that she'd know whether the used car is in good shape -- does she really know what she's doing? I will vote for a more radical approach but I'd always have that dilemma in the back of my mind," Thomas says. But that more radical approach may mean abandoning one of the foundations on which such Stuttgart icons as Porsche and Mercedes have built powerful global brands: good labor relations. Joerg Hofmann is local boss of the engineering union IG Metall. He opposes removing employment rights, whichever party does it. "I don't think less of regulation gives any more jobs," Hofmann says. "What we need is that we have innovative production here." I ask him: If the CDU and the FDP do come in, will you work together with them as trade unions in order to help them, to assist them in the labor market reform they want to introduce? "I don't think so ... because they speak on this question another language," he says. "If you look to the CDU-FPD program, it's a denial of social partnership and a denial of searching for the right balance of working class and capital, which was the old agreement for social peace and social development in Germany." Strolling later through a park in the center of Stuttgart, I come across a group of people playing chess -- some on giant boards. The decision they'll make Sunday on their economic future is every bit as strategic: A lack of foresight -- the wrong move now -- could mean success or failure, maybe not immediately but further down the line. Even Stuttgart's famously hard-working people know they may not be blessed with prosperity forever. 
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