GERMANY: German left-wing politician Oskar Lafontaine has attacked Chancellor Schröder and the members of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) he once lead as hypocrites.
The former finance minister said the new left-wing party he now heads is "urgently needed" ahead of the expected autumn election, and that his return to politics already has the so-called "Red-Green" SPD-led coalition on the run to the political left.
"The Red-Green government has clearly betrayed many former positions held by their parties," said Mr Lafontaine in an interview yesterday.
Six years after his dramatic resignation after only six months as finance minister, Mr Lafontaine (61) has returned from the political wilderness to head the new left-wing party of "social justice", the WASG.
It has provided a political home for left-wing politicians and voters who have turned their backs on the SPD in protest at social and economic reforms they consider a betrayal of the party's social democratic roots.
Just months after its foundation, the WASG is planning an electoral alliance and later a complete merger with the reformed communist Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS). The new entity is expected to be called the Left Party.
"The Left Party represents workers, the pensioners and the unemployed. The parties sitting in the Bundestag don't. They're in favour of wage cuts, pension cuts and dole cuts," said Mr Lafontaine. Together with the PDS, the WASG is already attracting up to 9 per cent support in the opinion polls.
Their electoral chances appear to have been boosted by Chancellor Schröder's decision to call a snap election, robbing his government of the chance to benefit from any positive effect of its reforms.
With unemployment stuck at 11 per cent and slow economic growth, the SPD has produced a decidedly left-wing election manifesto, for which Mr Lafontaine takes full credit.
"We had barely appeared on the horizon and immediately the [ reform] politicians changed their politics," he said. "The best is the SPD, which just recently reduced the tax rate for millionaires [ but] is now talking about increasing the top tax rate."
Meanwhile, it emerged yesterday that Mr Lafontaine's electoral campaign will be financed almost entirely by the PDS. That could prove controversial because the PDS has never fully opened its books from the months in 1990 when it emerged from East Germany's Socialist Unity Party (SED).
Over six billion East German marks in party funds and assets, officially belonging to party members, vanished from the SED coffers after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and before German unification a year later.
Parliamentary investigators believe huge amounts were distributed to SED officials and redirected by circuitous routes back into the PDS.
"The PDS tried to hide property and barely answered any questions properly," concluded a 1998 government inquiry into the vanished billions.
Murat Cakir, spokesman for Mr Lafontaine's WASG party, confirmed yesterday that the PDS was providing much of the funding for their joint election campaign but said it would not affect its electoral chances. "When you look at the huge campaign finance scandals of the Christian Democrats and Helmut Kohl, our conscience is completely clear," he said.