Shortly after Gerhard Schröder first became German chancellor in 1998, the British tabloid press declared his longtime rival and then finance minister Oskar Lafontaine "the most dangerous man in Europe." At the time, this seemed a ludicrous judgment - not least because it was quickly proved wrong by Lafontaine himself, who resigned only weeks afterward in what is generally regarded one of the more embarrassing cop-outs in postwar German politics.Now, almost seven years later, Lafontaine, who was the first former leader to be threatened with expulsion from the Social Democractic Party (SPD) for delivering a series of public diatribes against his own party, has joined forces with the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS, the former East German Communists) and other leftist groups, and looks set to win a sizable share of the vote in the national elections scheduled for Sept. 18.
An embittered ex-politician's attempt to stage a political comeback with a scratch alliance of left wingers, ex-Communists and globalization critics may not be all that unusual, given the current political climate across much of Europe, but there are a number of reasons that make the success of Lafontaine's Left Party (Linkspartei) especially worrisome.
For one, there is the size and scope of the movement. In Britain, the antigovernment member of Parliament George Galloway succeeded by running almost exclusively on an anti-Iraq-war platform, winning a narrow relative majority in a largely Muslim constituency. By contrast, the Lafontaine-led Left Party's agenda is much broader, exploiting widespread disappointment in the former East Germany and western German fears of economic impoverishment due to rising high-level unemployment.