The press release of Lafontaine that was forwarded however I think confirms the fault lines.
Experienced politicians can usually manage the personal animosities and rivalries if they can find a way of working on the fundamentals. However the modern media will look for every crack, expose it, and widen it by amplifying it. Even if the senior politician keeps perfectly to the party line, the subordinates will be jostling for influence for their patron.
Blair and Brown have patched up their differences and are taking economic initiatives and initiatives towards Europe together. Lafontaine and Schroeder have fallen apart.
German politics presupposes political language that permits the forming of alternative coalitions. This is done by subtle signals. The best informed commentators are speculating about further realignments of German politics, and thereby start to create it.
This is the move to a genuine Neue Mitte, the equivalent of Blair's Third Way.
Schroeder is not interested in using his narrow electoral victory as a sort of reformist dictatorship of the proletariat, in which he must be beholden to where the heart of the party is, to the left, and not in the stock exchange. He does not like the tone of Lafontaine's words and body language that "we are the masters now". Even when Lafontaine is right that there should be a reduction in interest rates.
Given that we are judging between two different reformist politicians, I think there is a case for saying that Schroeder is the more scientific. The proposition is that a modern capitalist country is best administered with a regime in the centre of the political spectrum. It is similar to a government of national unity. This will avoid outright challenges to capital except where the spectum of public opinion is such that capital has lost that particular battle. It is better to have a socially responsible agenda in which capital as well as labour are asked to respond to what is in the best interests of the whole society, rather than in their narrow sectarian interest. Such a role cannot be performed by a marxist party, and marxists should not tail behind Lafontaine. But it is an argument that it is better to have a regime that is a sort of government of national unity than a precarious reformist dictatorship of the left, unsupported by any bayonets.
In Lafontaine's statement you can see the key code words. Lack of team approach means he wanted the government to run on the basis of the resultant of forces between him, Schroeder and the Greens. He is signalling that the Greens' bargaining position has now been seriously weakened, as it has.
The speculation now is that Schroeder has the option if the Greens are inflexible to drop them and have an alliance with the FDP instead. Indeed soon after Lafontaine's resignation, the SDP made a tactical deal with the FDP in the Senate to get their new nationality law passed. The fact that Schoeder studiously expresses Respekt for all his enemies, whether they are Kohl or Lafontaine, is part of his conception of politics as best managed by consensus.
In wider class terms, I suggest the appointment of Eichel instead is significant. As former head of Hesse he worked in a pragmatic coalition with the Greens that did not antagonise the financiers of Frankfurt, the largest city in that Land. Lafontaine's strategy however was to combine the heart of the SDP with the interests of the Greens and impose his will. He offended both finance capital and industrial capital simulataneously.
I suggest the stategic balance of forces is such that reformists can work with environmentalists in a vague centre project provided they do not take on both sections of capital at the same time.
It is better for the government to seek to tame finance capital with a framework of "transparency", and to move against industrial capital only by facilitating wide discussions in civil society as a whole about how its production can be more socially responsible. The role of marxists is to analyse these contradictions and to support resistance against the exploitation and oppression of capital without getting caught up in supporting one side of the two party system.
At best Lafontaine is positioning himself to become the new Schroeder in five years time if the overall political spectrum in Germany has shifted to the left, when he will turn out to be miraculously responsible. Marxists do not need to tail him as the only hope for class struggle. Contradiction and class struggle will continuously spring up independent of Lafontaine or marxists.
Chris Burford
London
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>Lafontaine warns Schroeder over rightwing shift
>BERLIN, March 14 (AFP) - Former German finance minister Oskar Lafontaine
>implicitly warned Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder not to steer his ruling party
>too far to the right, urging the party to remember "the heart lies on the
>left, not in the stock exchange."
>Lafontaine, highly popular within the leftwing of the ruling Social
>Democratic Party (SPD), made the remarks in an interview with ARD
>television, his first political comments since quitting last Thursday.
>
>In a thinly veiled criticism of Schroeder's management skills, he said he
>had resigned because of a "poor team game" in the coalition government.
>
>Schroeder and Lafontaine had frequently squabbled over economic policy,
>particularly over tax initiatives that Germany's powerful business lobby
>contested would cripple competitiveness.
>
>