Berlin  - Oskar Lafontaine is not camera-shy when it comes to outlining his radical - even revolutionary - political goals.

Whether calling for the overthrow of capitalism or demanding an immediate German troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, he has skillfully used the media to increase national awareness of his hardline party, The Left.

Under Lafontaine's direction as co-chairman, The Left performed well in state elections at the end of August and hopes to repeat the feat when the country votes in a general election on September 27.

With its campaign slogan "Wealth for All," the party wants to reverse many of the social welfare cuts and market-oriented reforms introduced by the previous Social-Democrat-led government.

It is also campaigning for higher taxes on the rich, an improved minimum wage and lowering the retirement age to 65 from the 67 - a measure imposed by the current coalition headed by Chancellor Angela Merkel.

On foreign policy, The Left wants Germany to end its controversial military deployment in Afghanistan and bring home the 4,200 German troops serving there.

The Left Party is the only one in German lower house, or Bundestag, which calling for an immediate withdrawal. "All the other parties are war parties," Lafontaine says bluntly.

A gifted speaker, the 65-year-old Lafontaine was once leader of the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) and prime minister of the western state of Saarland.

He was also finance minister in the cabinet of SPD chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, but resigned after just six months in office in 1998 in protest at Schroeder's sweeping economic reforms.

Lafontaine later went on to form the Labour and Social Justice Party (WASG) along with other disgruntled Social Democrats and radical left-wingers in the west.

In 2007, that party merged with former East German communists in the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) to form The Left. Lafontaine is now its co-chairman and major figurehead.

Since then the party has been inching up in voter approval, mainly at the expense of the Social Democrats, whose traditional base of working class voters it has been luring away.

The Left polled more than 20 per cent of the vote in elections in three German states on August 30, including Saarland where it celebrated its biggest impact to date in a western state.

But it has not been able to capitalize on this showing at national level, where opinion polls put the party at between 9-12 per cent, slightly less than the environmentalist Greens.

"The Left will be lucky if it attains the figure of 8.7 per cent it scored in the last (general) election," said Professor Eckhard Jesse, a political analyst at the Technical University of Chemnitz.

"People want a party that has economic expertise," he told the German Press Agency dpa. They don't place much store in one that promises a lot but can't deliver."

Jesse ruled out the formation of a so-called leftist bloc grouping the SPD, Greens and the Left if Merkel's CDU fails to garner enough votes to mould a coalition with its preferred partner, the business-oriented Free Democrats.

"This might happen at some future date, or at state level, but not in the 2009 general election," Jesse said.

Such an alliance has also been ruled out by Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the SPD's candidate to challenge Merkel for the chancellorship. The SPD has never forgiven Lafontaine for bolting from the Schroeder government, an act it regards as betrayal.

While Lafontaine is the western face of the Left Party, some reformed communists in its eastern wing consider him too much of a radical for their liking.

Their champion is Gregor Gysi, leader of party's parliamentary group whose charisma and oratory skills have made him a popular guest on television chat shows.

But people in the west tend to look on him with suspicion because of allegations he was an informer for the East German secret police, the Stasi, during his time as a lawyer in East Berlin.

Indeed, the presence of former members of the old East German communist party, as much as The Left's radical rhetoric, is the most common criticism of the party by political opponents. (dpa)