Germany’s embattled Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, suffered another blow on Tuesday when the former chairman of his Social Democrat party (SPD) said he was defecting to a new leftwing alliance.
Oskar Lafontaine, who led the party until 1999, said that in the September general election he would stand as a candidate for a rival leftwing group made up of communists and disaffected SPD members.
Lafontaine, a former finance minister, has been a bitter critic of Schröder since the two men fell out six years ago. But his decision to leave the SPD adds to the difficulties faced by the chancellor, who announced on Sunday that he would seek an early general election after his party’s crushing poll defeat in North Rhine-Westphalia.
Lafontaine told the Bild newspaper on Tuesday, referring to Schröder’s two most contentious welfare reform programmes: ”I have always said that my formal membership is over if the Social Democrats go into the parliamentary elections with Agenda 2010 and Hartz IV.”
In the 1990s Lafontaine was seen as a leading SPD candidate for chancellor, until Schröder got the job. After serving briefly in Schröder’s first government, he stormed out in protest at the party’s increasingly business-friendly policies.
He is now likely to stand for the new Work and Social Justice party, which was founded six months ago by SPD defectors and trade unionists fed up with Schröder’s reforms. The new party is negotiating an electoral alliance with the ex-communist Party of Democratic Socialism, which is widely backed in East Germany.
On Tuesday Lafontaine’s former colleagues wasted little time in bidding him good riddance. The SPD’s general secretary, Klaus Uwe Benneter, declared: ”Oskar, go now. Stop your vain babbling and stop damaging the SPD.”
Lafontaine’s defection will almost certainly encourage some disillusioned SPD voters to abandon Schröder’s party for the new leftwing bloc.
In the North Rhine-Westphalia election at the weekend, however, the new party managed to win only 2,2% of the vote, below the 5% hurdle needed to get into Parliament.
With national opinion polls showing Schröder’s party trailing badly, the chancellor on Tuesday sought to cast the general election as a personality contest between himself and his challenger, Angela Merkel, the leader of the opposition Christian Democrats.
Of the two candidates, voters clearly find Schröder more charismatic. The problem for him is that they also seem not to like his policies. ”We would do well to lead a very personalised contest on the two leading figures,” Schröder told Die Zeit on Tuesday.
One survey on Monday showed a clear 42% to 30% preference for Schröder over Merkel, although another poll put the split at just 45 to 44 on Tuesday.
In the interview, Schröder also ruled out a pre-election commitment to the Greens, with whom the SPD has shared power in Berlin since 1998. His decision to hold the general election a year early may spell doom for the Greens, who have now been kicked out of government in all of Germany’s regional Parliaments, and who appear to be facing a long period in opposition. ”Everyone looks to win as many votes as possible against every other competitor. That goes without saying,” Schröder said, answering a question on the SPD-Green alliance.
After their defeat in North Rhine-Westphalia, there is not a single region still governed by an SPD-Greens partnership. In the late 1990s, the two parties ruled five of Germany’s 16 states.
Schr̦der relied on the buoyant Greens to stay in office in the tight 2002 election. Recently though, coalition tensions have increased. РGuardian Unlimited