Oskar Lafontaine’s story began in the Saarland, and it ends exhausted in the Saarland. As if life, even this politically big one, wants to close in a circle at the end. Oskar Lafontaine – what a bold, cheeky, intelligent young prime minister who was infectious with his passion. And what a sad and tragic figure he has become who, decades later, fails in a provincial farce in a marginalized left-wing party in Saarland. The ex-SPD chairman, ex-Federal Minister of Finance and ex-Left leader ends politically where he once began: with a great start and a bitter departure.
In between, of course, lay a career that has seldom existed in the Federal Republic. Like hardly anyone else, the 78-year-old has repeatedly shaken up the country’s history. Without him, Gerhard Schröder would not have become Federal Chancellor in 1998. It was Lafontaine who roused the SPD from a great lethargy at the memorable 1995 Mannheim party conference. And it was he who not only secured Schröder’s left half of the SPD for three years, but also made room for the one who had the better chance of being elected against Helmut Kohl.
And Angela Merkel? She also owes him the chancellorship
And what’s more: without him, Angela Merkel might never have become Chancellor. It was this same Oskar Lafontaine who, in anger at Schröder’s agenda policy, supported the newly founded Wahlalternative Arbeit und Sozialsrecht (WASG) in 2005 and probably robbed his former SPD of the decisive votes through the WASG’s electoral alliance with the PDS. As clever as he behaved on behalf of the Social Democrats in 1998, his effect was just as destructive seven years later. Few have had so much influence on the fate of a party and a country in peacetime.
But all of this also shows what characterized this Oskar Lafontaine throughout his political life: a wild combination of passion, genius and egocentricity. As good as he was at reading politics, as much as he was able to inspire, he could become tough when things didn’t go his way. The sharpest break of this kind came just a few months after winning the election, when Federal Finance Minister Lafontaine rebelled against Chancellor Schröder in March 1999. And not only caused trouble, but gave up his office, his party chairmanship and, first of all, his entire political career. As strong as he was up to the 1998 election campaign, even in renouncing his candidacy, he made himself so small in anger a year later. No moment could have shown better that he would not have made a good chancellor.
His great strength: He liked being with people
For a long time, Lafontaine brought with him a quality that one would wish for in the current chancellor (of the SPD): he went to the people. He was popular because he showed himself, vain of course, but he was there, despite his later growing arrogance, he liked to talk to people. to be with them. Anyone who has ever experienced Lafontaine’s internal Saarland successor Heiko Maas when he spoke about the people at home, could very quickly understand why one was very popular for a long time and the other never became Prime Minister.
It is bitterly sad, even downright absurd, that Schröder’s and Lafontaine’s farewell story coincides once again. One – Lafontaine – fails at home, in the smallest. The other – Schröder – fails in moral dealings with the warmonger Vladimir Putin. There are political farewells that are honorable and dignified. Like that of Hans-Jochen Vogel. This SPD chairman a. D. went and remained an authority that many oriented themselves to for a long time. Lafontaine (like Schröder) refused to do so. Each in his own way.