“I also asked myself whether it would not have been better to stay in the SPD”
Oskar Lafontaine turns his back on the Left Party
After half a century of political work, Oskar Lafontaine (78) left the Saarland state parliament with a speech about the war and announced that he was leaving the Left Party. Lafontaine will no longer stand in the upcoming state elections.
After leaving the Left Party, Oskar Lafontaine spoke about his political career in an interview. There are many things he regrets, he says. He does not want to found a new party.
Dhe former left leader Oskar Lafontaine does not want to found a new party despite leaving the party. In an interview by the “Süddeutsche Zeitung‘ the 78-year-old replied ‘No’ to a similar question.
Asked if he had any regrets in his long political career, Lafontaine said: “Of course I have many regrets. I also always asked myself whether it wouldn’t have been better to stay in the SPD.” The former SPD leader added: “But whether I would have managed to prevent Agenda 2010 or the current rearmament program and to enforce that the SPD adheres to Willy Brandt’s policy of détente, I don’t know.”
Lafontaine left the left he co-founded on Thursday. In a 44-line statement, he justified this, among other things, with a “gradual change in the political profile of the left” from 2015. It has become a party “in which the interests of employees and pensioners and a foreign policy based on international law and peace are no longer the focus”.
Lafontaine had already left the SPD in 2005, and in 1999 he resigned as party chairman and the office of federal finance minister in the dispute over the social cuts that were looming in the red-green federal government. In 2007 he was one of the co-founders of the Left Party, which was merged from the PDS and the WASG.
In the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” Lafontaine accused in particular the co-leader of the left, Susanne Hennig-Wellsow, of a “course of pandering to the SPD and the Greens”. As a result, the party slipped further and further in the voters’ favour. He did not take the decision to leave the party lightly, it matured over months. Lafontaine did not want to say whether his wife Sahra Wagenknecht had tried to change his mind, citing his privacy.
As the weather improves, Lafontaine wants to do more cycling with his wife again. He also has more time to read. “In political life there is not enough time for poetry. Now I have the opportunity to catch up,” said the 78-year-old.