analysis
Status: 03/17/2022 12:00 p.m
A week before the elections in Saarland, Oskar Lafontaine is leaving the party he helped found. It is the final break with the left – and the end of an extraordinary political career.
Shortly before the end he was back where he feels most comfortable: in the center of everyone’s attention. And so he went to the microphone again on Wednesday in the state parliament. “This is my last speech in the Saarland state parliament. I don’t want to give an opposition speech there, I just want to present my thoughts on the war. You’ll forgive me today.”
One last speech
It was a thoughtful speech, a speech that not only a few in the Saarland state parliament can give, with a very wide range, from literature to philosophy to the rude real-political admission. And it was a speech – and perhaps a special speech there – without absolute truths, without absolute answers, which Lafontaine has always liked to claim for himself in his career. Again and again applause in the plenary, of all factions, for him, the left.
Prime Minister at the age of 41
52 years ago, Lafontaine entered the Saarland state parliament for the first time. As a member of the SPD. At that time, Willy Brandt, whom he calls his political foster father, was Chancellor. Lafontaine becomes mayor in Saarbrücken and only a few years later prime minister at just 41. In the previously black Saarland. It will establish its reputation between visionary and bon vivant. Steel crisis, red light affairs, but also trend-setting decisions for the country that still have an impact today.
1990, Lafontaine is now the SPD’s candidate for chancellor, perhaps one of the most formative experiences. He is the victim of an assassination attempt, a woman stabs him at an election campaign event. “Of course it was a drastic experience. For the first time I realized that life is finite,” Lafontaine later recalled.
First all-German federal election in 1990: Lafontaine is the SPD candidate for chancellor
Image: picture alliance / dpa
Break with Schröder and the SPD
He barely survives, recovers. But the SPD loses the election, he returns to Saarland. In 1995 he staged a putsch to become party chairman, reorganized the party and let Gerhard Schröder go first in the chancellor candidacy – with success. Schröder becomes chancellor, Lafontaine his finance minister. But the relationship of the alpha animals, which was never a love match, breaks up after only a few months. Lafontaine resigns. Even the closest circle is not in the know.
Lafontaine didn’t say anything for days, then went to the press and spoke of a “bad team game”. He shifts his political work to the talk shows in the republic. Writes books and likes to quote himself with what is perhaps his most famous sentence: “The heart is not yet traded on the stock exchange, it beats on the left.”
The final break came in 2005: Lafontaine left the SPD, became a co-founder of the Left Party and its parliamentary group leader in the Bundestag. But the relationship is always divided. As so often before, Lafontaine withdraws to the Saar again. He leads the Left Party there to 21 percent.
Internal party war
But his dream, which he cherished to the last, of uniting the Left Party with his old love, the SPD, has not come true. Instead, his Saarland Left Party is falling apart in the inner-party war. In the end, Lafontaine even called for not voting for the party in Saarland. He keeps talking about cheating. There has been a hail of resignations and expulsions, and there was also a party expulsion procedure against Lafontaine. He is getting ahead of that.
A week before the state elections in Saarland, Lafontaine is leaving the left entirely. From the party he once founded. According to the statement, he no longer wants to belong to a party that no longer focuses on the interests of employees and pensioners and a foreign policy geared towards peace.
Intellectual, populist, class warrior, moralist
The development had been announced in the past few weeks, when many close confidants had already declared their departure. Lafontaine apparently wanted to wait for his last speech in the state parliament on Wednesday and then with a loud bang do a little more damage to his party, which has recently been less and less his party.
Lafontaine was always many things at the same time: an intellectual who can be a populist. A class warrior with a penchant for star cuisine. A moralist on the world political stage, once with alleged contacts in the Saarbrücken red light. With him, perhaps the most important but definitely most dazzling politician that Saarland has produced to date, finally leaves the political stage. Maybe a few years too late not to leave at least a few scratches on his life’s work. It is the ugly end of an extraordinary political career.