Wolfgang Schäuble, German statesman
Wolfgang Schäuble, who was among the most influential and combative political figures in postwar West Germany and who played central roles in his country’s reunification with the Communist east and in its subsequent projection of economic might, died Tuesday. He was 81.
His death was announced by Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag.
Mr. Schäuble’s uncompromising financial rigor was revered by debt-averse Germans. But it was reviled by citizens of poorer, more profligate countries in southern Europe, where he deployed Berlin’s huge economic muscle to impose unpopular austerity measures to protect the single euro currency.
For several years before and after Germany’s reunification in October 1990, Mr. Schäuble was viewed widely as the heir apparent to Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Even after a would-be assassin opened fire on him just days after reunification, wounding him in the face and chest and causing spinal damage that consigned him to a life in a wheelchair, he nurtured ambitions to succeed Kohl. In the late 1990s, he even publicly raised the issue of whether Germans might elect a politician who uses a wheelchair as chancellor. The shooter, Dieter Kaufmann, was later declared by judges to be mentally ill.
After Kohl lost the 1998 national election, Mr. Schäuble (SHOY-bleh) succeeded him as leader of the conservative Christian Democratic Union, or CDU.
But a year later, the party became embroiled in a scandal relating to illicit political donations.
The fallout damaged Kohl most of all, but Mr. Schäuble was forced to resign in 2000 after admitting that he received a cash donation of 100,000 Deutschmarks, or $52,000, in 1994 from Karlheinz Schreiber, an arms dealer and lobbyist.
Mr. Schäuble denied he had concealed the money unlawfully, but his departure, along with Kohl’s fall from grace, decapitated the CDU’s old guard, providing an opportunity for Angela Merkel to take over as party leader. She became Germany’s first female chancellor after elections in 2005 and held the job until 2021.
The scandal drew a bitter line under the once close relationship between Kohl and Mr. Schäuble, and the two men rarely spoke to each other again. It was a token of Mr. Schäuble’s perceived importance at the core of German and European decision-making that Merkel rehabilitated him in the run-up to the 2005 elections and later appointed him as interior minister — a position he had held under Kohl.
In the years after the 9/11 attacks in the United States in 2001, when European and German officials feared a potential onslaught on their own soil, Mr. Schäuble acquired a reputation as a hard-liner on terrorism. He advocated laws that would empower German security forces to shoot down hijacked planes and to assassinate suspected foreign terrorists.
Adversaries who supported Germany’s postwar defense of individual rights accused him of rekindling the kind of oppression that marked Germans’ historical experience of both Nazism and Communism.
It was as finance minister from 2009 to 2017, however, that Mr. Schäuble achieved his greatest notoriety in European circles as an unbending enforcer of the strict fiscal regime underpinning the single currency.
In Greece, in particular, his insistence on austerity, cost-cutting, and privatization of state industries in return for financial bailouts drew widespread condemnation from citizens. On the streets of Athens, posters likened him to Adolf Hitler.
Playing bad cop to Merkel’s relatively more amenable fiscal persona, Mr. Schäuble sponsored a proposal in 2015 under which Greece might temporarily withdraw from the zone of countries using the euro single currency. The idea, anathema to supporters of European integration, became known as Grexit and was never enacted.
Mr. Schäuble’s proposal alarmed Greece’s European allies — notably, France and Italy. But the measures he advocated had lasting effects. By 2023, Greece had become one of Europe’s fastest-growing economies.
In the end, the threat to European Union cohesion came from a different source: Britain, which voted narrowly in a 2016 referendum to leave the bloc in what was called Brexit. Before that ballot, and with characteristic bluntness, Mr. Schäuble seemed to warn Britons that if they left the EU, there could be no compromise on the outcome.
“In is in, out is out,” he told Der Spiegel magazine.
Wolfgang Schäuble was born Sept. 18, 1942, in Freiburg im Breisgau in southern Germany. He was one of a dwindling cohort of German politicians with direct experience of Germany’s postwar division and West Germany’s struggle to emerge from the ruin of World War II. The ensuing economic resurgence, which came to be known as the Wirtschaftswunder, or economic miracle, was aided by the Marshall Plan, in which the United States provided billions of dollars in aid for Europe’s financial recovery.
He was the second of three brothers born to Karl Schäuble, a financial and tax adviser, and his wife, Gertrud Schäuble. In 1969, before he qualified fully as a lawyer, he married Ingeborg Hensle, an economist and teacher. He is survived by his wife, three daughters, and a son.