Wolfgang Schäuble, who has died aged 81, was a giant of German public life, epitomising the successes, anxieties and obduracy of his postwar country. The longest-serving parliamentarian in German history, Schäuble played a pivotal role in two crucial events of the past four decades – the process that led to reunification in 1990 and the austerity measures imposed across much of Europe following the global financial crash of 2008.
To the German public, he will probably be best known as the politician who was shot while campaigning, by a man suffering from mental illness, and paralysed from the waist down, only to return to frontline politics within months. Seven years later, in 1997, Schäuble was asked by an interviewer from Stern magazine how his use of a wheelchair might affect his chances of fulfilling his ultimate ambition. “A cripple as chancellor?” he replied. “You have every right to ask that question.” Bluntness and a lack of self-pity became his leitmotifs.
The second of three sons of Karl, a tax adviser, and Gertrud, Schäuble was born in Freiburg im Breisgau, in the southwest region of Baden Württemberg, and studied law in his hometown and in Hamburg, though he quickly turned to politics. He entered parliament for the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in 1972, at the age of 30. He went on to win the Offenburg constituency 14 times in a row, sitting in the Bundestag under every postwar chancellor except the first, Konrad Adenauer.
In 1984 he entered the cabinet when Helmut Kohl appointed him head of the chancellery (chief of staff) and minister for special affairs. In April 1989, he was promoted to interior minister. It was from that position, but still in the manner of the chancellor’s fixer, that Schäuble led the reunification negotiations that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall.
During these talks he first came across Angela Merkel, an unassuming scientist from the GDR who had become a senior adviser to its outgoing government. The triangular relationship is one of the most fascinating and complex in modern German history. Schäuble claimed to have “discovered” her, suggesting her for the new all-German cabinet. Kohl patronised her as “the girl”, yet he increasingly promoted her. The assumption throughout was, however, that when the time came the one male titan would replace the other.
Kohl’s 16 years of office – a period of economic growth for Germany and the hegemony of post-cold-war liberal economics – ended in 1998 with the election victory of the Social Democrats under Gerhard Schröder. Schäuble, who had been leader of the parliamentary party, effortlessly succeeded Kohl as head of the CDU and leader of the opposition.
Within months, they were embroiled in scandal: a former party treasurer was caught taking a suitcase filled with a million German marks (about £300,000) from an arms dealer in a parking lot in Switzerland. It soon emerged that this transaction formed part of a much vaster system of corruption. Schäuble professed ignorance about the affair, only to be implicated, and exposed as having lied to parliament.
It was then that Merkel struck, publishing a letter in the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper in December 1999 in which she called on her party to shift generations. In so doing, she paved the way for her assumption of the crown and her long political hegemony. Kohl never forgave her.
In the fourth of six books he wrote during his career, called Mitten im Leben (In the Midst of Life) and published in 2000, Schäuble talked about his political regrets. He did not criticise Merkel, but, unlike all the other politicians he named with first and surnames, he referred to her as “Frau Merkel”. When he later asked her why she had not informed him in advance of her plans – he was still party leader after all – she replied: “You wouldn’t have allowed me to.”
When she eventually became chancellor in 2005, Merkel appointed Schäuble her interior minister. They buried their differences, and he served her loyally, in that post and then from 2009 as finance minister during her second and third administrations. He became the continent’s dominant economic force and leading enforcer of austerity, seeking to embed Germany’s strictures of balanced budgets – the Black Zero – across the EU. With his opposition to bailouts, and advocacy of spending cuts and structural reforms, Schäuble became an object of hate among many on the left, particularly in those countries teetering on the brink.
In his 2017 memoir, Adults in the Room, Greece’s finance minister at the time, Yanis Varoufakis, claimed that his German counterpart admitted that the medicine couldn’t work, but had to be administered for ideological reasons. Schäuble long denied this. Indeed, one of the curiosities of Germany’s obsession with austerity budgets – which is now causing considerable heartache for Olaf Scholz’s government – is that they remain largely popular, according to opinion polls.
Throughout his career Schäuble was a staunch pro-Atlanticist. He was one of few senior German politicians to support the Iraq war. He was also much more hawkish than others towards Russia, likening its seizure of Crimea in 2014 to Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland.
In 2017 he was chosen as president (speaker) of parliament, a role he was initially reluctant to take, but fulfilled with his characteristic acuity. He had let it be known that he would like to become Germany’s president, a largely ceremonial but important position, but was twice overlooked.
Schäuble is survived by his wife, the economist and teacher Ingeborg Hensle, whom he married in 1969, and by three daughters, Christine, Juliane and Anna, and a son, Hans-Jörg.
• Wolfgang Schäuble, politician, born 18 September 1942; died 26 December 2023
