When German voters go to the polls on Sunday, the fate of companies like SKW Piesteritz will be at the top of their minds. The chemical factory halved its annual Christmas bonus for workers last year, and it just shut down one of its two ammonia plants.

Hammered by high energy costs and what they call excessive German regulation, executives say they might be forced to move production abroad. That would jeopardize 10,000 jobs in and around the small community of Lutherstadt Wittenberg in the country’s economically depressed eastern region, which has already been hurt by pullbacks at the company.

“It is a catastrophe,” said Torsten Zugehör, the local mayor.

The German election has in part focused on hot-button issues like immigration and more recently on the threat to the Atlantic alliance presented by President Trump. But the overriding concern in daily German life, according to interviews and polls, and the thing most likely to drive the choice of voters, is the nation’s anemic economy.

Business executives, workers and politicians alike agree that the next German chancellor must move quickly to repair the country’s ailing industrial sector, or risk economic and political disaster for years to come.

German competitiveness, long a source of national pride, “was never as bad as it is today,” said Petr Cingr, chairman of the board of SKW, which makes products such as fertilizers and an additive for diesel motors.