Editor's Note: Today we are introducing Spiegel Online's new weekly political column looking at the latest developments and insights on Germany's snap autumn elections.

Could the situation get any worse for German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and his center-left Social Democrats (SPD)? His popularity ratings are more akin to what one might expect from a Bush candidacy in France. The frumpy Angela Merkel from the center-right Christian Democrats -- and Schroeder's opponent in the autumn elections -- has a new hairdo and a growing following. And now he is being attacked by a leftist alliance made up of a former East German communist fresh out of the hospital following a massive heart attack and brain surgery, and a former SPD heavyweight and Schroeder foil who combines narcissism with a unique recipe for making left-wing politics using right-wing-populist rhetoric as chief ingredients.

Meet Gregor Gysi (the communist) and Oskar Lafontaine (the narcissist) and their new political party with the preliminary name of "Linksbuendnis," or "Left Alliance." Even without much in the way of a campaign platform, the two well-known politicians form a formidable union. After years as the post Cold-War intellectual head of the post-communist Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), Gysi is well-loved in former East Germany. Indeed, his party received a solid 17 percent support in 2002 in the east. Lafontaine, on the other hand, was head of the SPD and then Schroeder's finance minister following his entry into the chancellery in 1998.

But then, they both dropped off the political radar. After heading the PDS parliamentary group in the Bundestag and then becoming Senator for the Economy in Berlin in 2001, Gysi resigned all positions soon afterwards, leaving many with the impression that he was more interested in opposition politics than in taking over any political responsibility. He receded out of the public eye and into his law firm -- and then into the hospital.

Similar doubts about political reliability have dogged Lafontaine. He didn't last long as a member of Schroeder's cabinet and resigned unexpectedly in March 1999 from all his political offices. Not long afterwards, he published a book in which he bitterly settled a number of scores with his former political allies. Since then, he has been on the talk show circuit, appearing whenever the media needed a harsh critic of Schroeder's reform policies.

>Now, however, they are once again back on the national political stage -- Gysi at the helm of the PDS after announcing his comeback by allowing the tabloid Bild to publish pictures of his brain scans, and Lafontaine as the front man for the western German leftists known as the Wahlalternative Arbeit und soziale Gerechtigkeit (WASG -- Election Alternative for Work and Social Justice) after dropping his SPD membership as soon as Schroeder dropped the early election bomb . Together, their new party has 9 percent support according to the most recent polls -- more than the Greens, more than the Liberals and well more than the 5 percent they need to achieve representation in Germany's parliament, the Bundestag.

And that support very likely represents a sizable chunk of votes that Schroeder and the SPD won't get.

Some are keen to compare the Gysi-Lafontaine phenomenon with the Ralph Nader sydrome, named for the American politician who helped Al Gore lose the 2000 election in his failed bid to establish the underdeveloped Green Party in Washington. But the new left here is, more than anything, symptomatic of widespread disgust among the entire left side of the political spectrum at the country's slow abandonment of social programs that have been enshrined for decades. The cuts in unemployment benefits, frozen retirement payments, and the slashes across the famed cradle-to-the-grave social programs introduced by Schroeder's seven-year-old government have proven painful and extremely unpopular. Even if May saw a halt to the trend -- Schroeder's SPD has lost tens of thousands of party members in the past three years.

An opportunity, surely, for the Left Alliance. Gysi, so the plan goes, will do his usual magic with the downtrodden voters of economically troubled eastern Germany and Lafontaine -- with his name-recognition and charisma -- will be responsible for raking in identifiable percentages of dissatisfied workers from the West. For Gysi, in other words, the support is already there. Lafontaine, on the other hand, will have to work a bit harder.

And he has already provided a number of difficult-to-misunderstand clues about what route he will take. Early last week, Lafontaine suddenly transformed himself into a run-of-the-mill populist a la Joerg Haider or Pim Fortuyn. It is the state's duty, he deadpanned, to protect German fathers and mothers from having their jobs taken by foreign workers. Even worse, the word he used, Fremdarbeiter or foreign worker, is a no-no in Germany. That, after all, is what Hitler called them. Should one conclude that Lafontaine merely tripped over his own tongue? Hardly. A quick glance at his most-recent book tells a slightly different story. In it, as the influential weekly Die Zeit reported last week, he writes about the "forced immigration" that has been shoved down the nation's throat by Germany's elite. He wants to withdraw citizenship from all those who "don't speak the German language, don't pay their share of taxes and finance the social state." And he expresses his concern that the US will no longer have a white majority in 50 years.

In short, it appears that while Gysi will remain true to his basis of eastern post-communists, Lafontaine is dragging the bottom for a hodge-podge of leftists, right wingers and whoever else might be socially or financially insecure and/or dislike having to share a subway car with the Turkish immigrant neighbors.

It still isn't at all clear that the Left Alliance will work. The two parties that are to be wed spent much of the past two weeks bickering over what they were to call themselves -- with neither really wanting to give up its original name. There are also, as SPIEGEL reported on Monday, a number of legal questions still to be resolved surrounding the shot-gun wedding. And members from both parties have likewise voiced concern that the two political bodies have, in the final analysis, very little to do with each other politically. Convinced, eastern post-communists on the one hand and frustrated, western champagne socialists on the other.