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Wolfgang Schäuble, who helped negotiate German reunification in 1990 and as finance minister was a central figure in the austerity-heavy effort to drag Europe out of its debt crisis more than two decades later, has died. He was 81.
Schäuble died at home on Tuesday evening, his family told the German news agency dpa on Wednesday.
Schäuble became chancellor Angela Merkel’s finance minister in October 2009, shortly before revelations about Greece’s ballooning budget deficit set off the crisis that engulfed the continent and threatened to destabilise the world’s financial order.
A longtime supporter of greater European unity, he helped lead a years-long effort that aimed for deeper integration and a stricter rulebook. But Germany drew criticism for its emphasis on austerity and a perceived lack of generosity.
After eight years as finance minister, Schäuble cemented his status as an elder statesman by becoming the German parliament’s speaker – the last step in a long frontline political career during which he overcame daunting setbacks. He remained a lawmaker until his death.
Schäuble used a wheelchair after being paralysed from the waist down when he was shot at an election rally in 1990, shortly after reunification.
He returned to work only a few weeks later and, the next year, was credited with helping sway Germany’s parliament to move the reunited nation’s capital from Bonn to Berlin.
On his 70th birthday in 2012, Merkel described Schäuble as “an architect of German unity, an architect of the government’s move, and currently an architect of a stable eurozone”.
Merkel said the veteran minister “embodies the long-term memory of the republic … without you, our country would look different”.
From the early days of Europe’s debt crisis, Schäuble pushed for tougher rules to keep government deficits under control. Berlin initially resisted bailing out Greece and other debt-laden countries, and critics said Germany’s reluctance increased the price tag.
Germany, the EU’s lead lender, stamped its mark on the rescue effort by insisting on tough conditions such as budget cuts in exchange for helping struggling countries and kept them under pressure to comply. In 2012, Schäuble said European countries were “on the right track – in reducing their deficits, improving their productivity and so their competitiveness”.
“That is the decisive thing, and we cannot spare any country this through supposed generosity or solidarity,” he said. “That is not obstinacy – it is understanding that democratic majorities only make unpleasant decisions when there is no easier alternative.”
When a leftwing Greek government under prime minister Alexis Tsipras was elected in 2015 on pledges to scrap the painful spending cuts and tax hikes demanded by creditors, Schäuble took a tough line. Later that year, he suggested Greece could take a five-year “timeout” from the euro, but fell in line with Merkel’s insistence that a “Grexit” was off the table.
Under pressure at home for reform of the wider financial system, Schäuble pushed with mixed results for a levy on banks to ensure that they paid the costs of future crises, and for an international tax on transactions.
He drew criticism for an abrupt and unilateral German ban on some speculative trading practices, which unsettled markets, for which he was unapologetic. “If you want to drain a swamp, you don’t necessarily ask the frogs if you want an objective verdict,” he said.
In Germany, Schäuble took pride in balancing the budget for the first time in decades. Critics – mostly outside Germany – said that fiscal restraint held back the recovery of the currency union as a whole.
Schäuble, who was born in 1942 in Freiburg, south-west Germany, worked as a tax official in Baden-Württemberg before winning election to the West German parliament in 1972.
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He first joined West Germany’s cabinet in 1984, serving as chancellor Helmut Kohl’s chief of staff for nearly five years before becoming interior minister.
In that job, Schäuble was a key West German negotiator as the country headed toward reunification with the communist east after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. He helped ready the treaty that created the legal framework for unification on 3 October 1990.
Nine days after reunification, Schäuble was shot while campaigning for the united country’s first election in Oppenau, in south-western Germany. An assailant with a history of mental illness fired a shot into Schäuble’s spine that left him paralysed. Another bullet hit his face, requiring Schäuble to undergo plastic surgery.
Schäuble quickly returned to politics. In 1991, he delivered an impassioned plea to parliament for post-reunification Germany to return to its traditional capital.
“Deciding for Berlin is a decision to overcome the division of Europe,” he said, before lawmakers voted narrowly to back the move.
From 1991 to 1998, Schäuble served as parliamentary leader of Kohl’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU). He finally became CDU leader after Kohl’s 16-year stint as chancellor ended in a 1998 election defeat.
However, in 2000, after becoming implicated in a party financing scandal surrounding Kohl, he was replaced by Merkel.
Schäuble was later touted as a candidate for Germany’s largely ceremonial presidency, but was passed over as Merkel chose the former International Monetary Fund chief Horst Köhler.
He returned to the cabinet when Merkel became chancellor in 2005 for a second stint as interior minister. He was an unexpected, but widely respected, choice as finance minister in 2009.
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