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“... of the Left still leave much to be desired – not least by the former German Finance Minister Oskar Lafontaine, who now documents his many criticisms in a revealing account of his experiences in the lead-up to and the aftermath of the Red-Green coalition of 1998. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Germany had a three-party or – as it was sometimes ...”

“... can, but if December’s election is an all-Germany one, the main beneficiary could be not him but Oskar Lafontaine. The colourful and erratic Minister-President of the Saarland has just been chosen, following a brilliantly successful re-election campaign in his Land, as the SPD’s Chancellor-candidate for December. He has alarmed the Federal ...”

“... election because they thought he could manage unification more efficiently than the SPD’s Oskar Lafontaine, not because they thought it was the greatest thing that had ever happened to them. The third irony is that those who most wanted to preserve the GDR, other than the nomenklatura and their hangers-on, were the dissidents round the New Forum ...”

“... critique of a major element of the European institutional structure – the euro. It was Oskar Lafontaine – ‘Red Oskar’ – who broke the silence. ‘Hopes that the creation of the euro would force rational economic behaviour on all sides were in vain,’ he said, and called for the single currency to be ...”

“... left, was sworn in as Hesse’s environment minister. By the end of the 1980s, with the pugnacious Oskar Lafontaine, the prime minister of Saarland, in the vanguard, a new breed of SPD-led ecosocialists was on the march. Germany’s Red-Green future was deferred by the collapse of the Soviet Union. The fall of the Wall scrambled the political expectations ...”

“... and dependability so rarely go together.’ The favourite of members and apparatus alike remains Oskar Lafontaine, whose skill, charisma and discipline galvanised the SPD machine in the years of Kohl’s decline. Lafontaine was another postwar orphan from a poor family, educated by Jesuits in the Saar, who became the ...”

“... strands of West German social democracy. The biggest break, if you like, was in Germany, where Oskar Lafontaine had a left-Keynesian programme; he opposed the war Germany had waged in Yugoslavia, saying that the German state had yet to acknowledge its responsibility for the break-up of Yugoslavia. The very fact that he split openly and publicly was ...”