Well, how about a 320-page book? Lafontaine’s “The Heart Beats on the Left,” serialized last week, drops all pretense of closeness. Not that much remained. From the moment Schroder became chancellor, it was clear he would have to marginalize old-school leftists like Lafontaine if he intended to wrench his party to the center. Fed up and angry, Lafontaine abruptly withdrew from politics last March, giving up his posts as party chairman and Finance minister, even his seat in Parliament. His book explains why. In an all-out attack on his erstwhile ally, he writes that Schroder betrayed voters by sharply cutting welfare spending and ushering in a “neoconservative” era.
In theory, Lafontaine’s assault couldn’t have come at a worse time for Schroder. His government’s highly unpopular austerity program is blamed for a string of recent SPD defeats in state and local elections. But party leaders rallied round; one denounced Lafontaine as an “egomaniac”; another said he was acting like “a spoiled child throwing away his toys.” Even former supporters wrote him off. “Today, none of us here miss him anymore,” said Dieter Schulte, the head of the German trade-union federation. And stridently leftist novelist Gunter Grass, winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, blasted Lafontaine: “Shut up! Drink your red wine, take a vacation and find something meaningful to do.”
The book’s treatment of Schroder is scathing. Lafontaine finds nothing–not even the chancellor’s off-key singing–too petty to criticize. During a quarrel over naming the party’s parliamentary leader, Lafontaine writes, Schroder “left the room speechless, as he always did when he was furious or wanted to demonstrate the loneliness of the great statesman.” When he’s not being bitterly ironic, Lafontaine indulges in self-pity, noting that such spats prompted nightmares about the assassination attempt against him in 1990, when a deranged woman stabbed him in the neck.
Lafontaine’s plea to the party faithful: reject Schroder and his hated centrists and “tame the capitalism gone wild.” If only the SPD had formed a government with the Party of Democratic Socialism, east Germany’s ex-communists, he writes; that would have guaranteed a commitment to leftist orthodoxy. He attacks Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer of the Greens, who once shared his radicalism. Fischer’s sin was following Washington’s lead in Kosovo, allowing NATO to pursue its “reckless and irresponsible” actions. “It’s bitter and really hurts to watch a friend politically self-destruct,” Fischer replied. Schroder has avoided responding directly to Lafontaine, leaving that task to his defenders. For his part, Lafontaine writes that “I couldn’t keep quiet when the trust of the German voters had been abused.” But a lot of Germans suspect a more basic motive: revenge.
