Wolfgang Schaeuble, who helped negotiate German reunification in 1990 and as finance minister was a central figure in the austerity policies promoted to pull Europe out of the debt crisis two decades later, has died at the age of 81 at his home on Tuesday night, his family told the German news agency dpa on Wednesday. He leaves a wife (Ingeborg) and four children.
Schaeuble became Chancellor Angela Merkel’s finance minister in October 2009, just before revelations about Greece’s ballooning budget deficit triggered the crisis that engulfed the continent and threatened to destabilize the global financial order, AFP reports.
A longtime supporter of greater European unity, he helped lead a years-long effort aimed at deeper integration and stricter regulation. But Germany drew criticism for its emphasis on austerity and an apparent lack of generosity.
After eight years as finance minister, the conservative Schaeuble cemented his status as an elder statesman by becoming president of the German Parliament (Bundestag), the latest step in a long frontline political career that saw him overcome enormous setbacks. He died as the country’s longest-serving legislator.
A mentally disturbed man shot Schaeuble at an election rally in 1990, just after reunification. He was paralyzed from the waist down and used a wheelchair for the rest of his life. He returned to work weeks later and, the following year, was credited with helping influence the German parliament to move the reunified nation’s capital from Bonn to Berlin.
Schaeuble “has shaped our country for more than half a century: as a legislator, minister and speaker of parliament,” Chancellor Olaf Scholz wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “With him, Germany loses a sharp thinker, a passionate politician and a combative democrat.”
Merkel said Schaeuble was a “master politician” when she was a young minister in the 1990s and “one of the anchors” of her cabinets. She said she “admired her discipline, even toward himself.”
European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde, who worked with Schaeuble as French finance minister and head of the International Monetary Fund, said he “was one of the most influential European leaders of his generation.”
From the early days of the European debt crisis, Schaeuble pushed for stricter rules to keep government deficits under control. Initially, Berlin resisted bailing out Greece and other indebted countries.
Germany left its mark on the rescue effort, insisting on tough conditions, such as budget cuts, in exchange for helping struggling countries and keeping them under pressure to comply. In 2012, Schaeuble insisted that European countries “are on the right path: in reducing their deficits, in improving their productivity and, therefore, their competitiveness.”
“That is what is decisive and we cannot spare any country this through supposed generosity or solidarity,” he said. “It’s not obstinacy: it’s understanding that democratic majorities only make unpleasant decisions when there is no easier alternative.”
When a left-wing Greek government under Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras was elected in 2015 with a promise to eliminate painful spending cuts and tax increases demanded by creditors, Schaeuble took a hard line. Later that year, he suggested Greece could take a five-year “break” from the euro, but agreed with Merkel’s insistence that a so-called “Grexit” was off the table.
Yanis Varoufakis, who faced Schaeuble as Tsipras’s first finance minister, wrote that “history will judge him harshly, but no harsher than those who succumbed to his disastrous project and policies.”
Seeking broader financial reform, Schaeuble pushed for a tax on banks to ensure they pay the costs of future crises, and for an international transaction tax. He was criticized for an abrupt and unilateral German ban on some speculative trading practices, which disrupted markets.
In Germany, Schaeuble took pride in balancing the budget for the first time in decades. Critics, mostly outside Germany, argued that fiscal tightening slowed the recovery of the monetary union as a whole.
Schaeuble was born on September 18, 1942 in Freiburg. He worked as a tax official in his home state of Baden-Wuerttemberg in the southwest before winning elections to the West German parliament in 1972.
He first joined the West German cabinet in 1984, and served as chancellor Helmut Kohl’s chief of staff for five years before becoming interior minister.
In that role, Schaeuble was a key negotiator for West Germany as the country moved toward reunification with the communist East after the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, and helped prepare the treaty that created the legal framework for unification on October 3, 1990.
After the attack that confined him to a wheelchair, Schaeuble quickly returned to politics. In 1991, he made an impassioned appeal to Parliament for post-reunification Germany to return to its traditional capital, Berlin. “Deciding for Berlin is a decision to overcome the division of Europe,” he said. Lawmakers narrowly backed the measure.
From 1991 to 2000, Schaeuble headed the parliamentary group of the conservative Union bloc, dominated by Kohl’s Christian Democratic Union. He eventually became leader of the CDU party after Kohl’s 16-year stint as chancellor ended in an election defeat in 1998.
However, he resigned in February 2000 after being implicated in a party financing scandal surrounding Kohl. Merkel became leader of the CDU.
Schaeuble was later touted as a candidate for Germany’s largely ceremonial presidency, but was passed over when Merkel chose former International Monetary Fund chief Horst Koehler.
He returned to the cabinet when Merkel became chancellor in 2005 for her second term as interior minister.
