Shortly before the state elections in Saarland, former Left Party leader Oskar Lafontaine resigned from the party.

"I no longer want to belong to a party in which the interests of employees and pensioners and a foreign policy based on international law and peace are no longer the focus and which also supports the fraud system established in Saarland," said the 78-year-old Lafontaine on Thursday and lamented "the gradual change in the political profile of the left" from 2015. Many employees and pensioners had turned their backs, went back to the SPD, became non-voters or voted for the AfD.

Helen Bubrowski

Political correspondent in Berlin.

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Julian Staib

Political correspondent for Hesse, Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland based in Wiesbaden.

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The politician, who was SPD chairman from 1995 to 1999, declared in autumn that he would no longer stand in the state elections in Saarland on Sunday next week.

Since 2009, the former prime minister of Saarland has led the left parliamentary group in the state parliament.

Due to internal party disputes, he is threatened with expulsion from the party, which he forestalled by resigning.

Three dry sentences

The leaders of the party and parliamentary group at the federal level expressed their regret in a press release, but the three sentences were rather dry.

"As founding chairman and long-standing group leader," Oskar Lafontaine has "lasting merits" for the Left Party, said group leaders Amira Mohamed Ali and Dietmar Bartsch, as well as party leaders Janine Wissler and Susanne Hennig-Wellsow, on Thursday.

"We think his resignation is wrong and we regret it." In view of increasing social inequality, in view of war and armament, a strong left is "urgently needed", it continues.

Lafontaine first entered the Saarland state parliament 52 years ago.

The party has him to thank for its great successes in the Saar, but from the point of view of some now also its decline.

For a long time, Lafontaine was the father of the left in Saarland, ran three times as their top candidate and achieved double-digit results each time.

But then internal party disputes escalated and Lafontaine called in the election campaign for the 2021 federal election not to vote for the left.

The background to this is a dispute that has been smoldering for years with his former confidante, today's chairman of the Saar Left Party, Thomas Lutze.

Lafontaine accused him of manipulating and buying votes, which Lutze denied.

After Lafontaine's call for a boycott, expulsion proceedings were instituted against him.

Lafontaine did not want to wait for the outcome of the proceedings.

He recently gave his last speech as a member of parliament in the state parliament.

Lafontaine leaves behind a hopelessly divided national association that has been torn apart for years.

The distortions are also reflected in the state parliament.

Since November, in addition to the “Die Linke” faction, to which Lafontaine belongs, there has also been the “Saar-Left” faction, to which the former Lafontaine confidante Barbara Spaniol belongs, but who Lafontaine then had thrown out of the faction.

Spaniol is now one of Lutze's camp - and is now her party's top candidate in the state elections.

You are threatened with a heavy defeat.

The most recent polls put the left in the Saar at just five percent, and even leading party members no longer believe it will be successful.

The left in Saarland could be on the verge of slipping into insignificance, for which many in the party also blame Lafontaine.

A past in the SPD

It is the second time that Lafontaine has broken with a party.

In 1999, six months after the start of the red-green coalition in Berlin, the then SPD chairman and finance minister announced his resignation and resigned his seat in the Bundestag.

In a brief statement, he justified this withdrawal from all offices with the "bad team game" in the government.

The background to this were conflicts between him and the then Federal Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (SPD) over social policy, which later led to Agenda 2010.

In 2005, Lafontaine left the party and declared on the same day that he would support a left-wing alliance of WASG and PDS in the 2005 federal elections.

In 1990, Lafontaine was still the SPD's candidate for chancellor.

During an election campaign in Cologne-Mülheim, he was critically injured by a mentally ill woman.