The memoirs of Wolfgang Schäuble, who died at the end of 2023, also take a look back at the CDU donations affair. A contemporary witness sees new, explosive findings here. But today’s Union faction leadership waves it off. Rightly so?
The CDU donations affair – it forced Wolfgang Schäuble to resign as party and parliamentary group leader in 2000 and also cost him a possible candidacy for chancellor in 2002. No wonder that the darkest chapter of his career also plays a role in his posthumously published memoirs. He also devotes several pages to an aspect of the affair that has so far received little attention: a slush fund belonging to the Bundestag faction.
According to his recollection in 1982, this “factional fund”, Schäuble writes, contained six to seven million marks and – as he only realized afterwards – was part of a “comprehensive system of slush funds”. The then Chancellor Helmut Kohl appeared to have created it during his time as parliamentary group leader and accessed it when necessary, writes Schäuble.
The faction account still existed in 1991, contrary to what Kohl’s intimate Uwe Lüthje claimed, who, as Schäuble explains, wrote in his notes that the faction account had already been closed in 1982 and the money in it was transferred to the CDU headquarters. Schäuble contradicts: “The debits just continued.”
“Comprehensive system of black cash registers”
For Frank Hofmann, a former SPD member of the Bundestag and chairman of the committee investigating the CDU donations affair at the turn of the millennium, Schäuble’s memoirs contain something new. At the request of the ARD capital studios says Hofmann, in the committee the CDU only ever admitted individual money movements. Now, however, “Wolfgang Schäuble is becoming clear and is writing about a comprehensive system of slush funds.”
The Union faction in the Bundestag comes to a different assessment. She explains at the request of ARD capital studios, she is not planning any further investigative work on the matter. The parliamentary manager Thorsten Frei says that the investigation took place more than two decades ago: “The final report of the committee of inquiry dated June 13, 2002 provides sufficient answers.”
SPD warns: Don’t go back to the agenda now
You see it a little differently in the SPD parliamentary group. Their domestic policy spokesman Sebastian Hartmann advises the Union not to simply go back to business as usual. Although he also points out possible statutes of limitations, he recommends that the CDU/CSU parliamentary group “clarify the information in the room and, if necessary, thoroughly process their own party history legally.”
Schäuble himself is self-critical on the subject of enlightenment in his memoirs. In the “Kohl system,” he writes, there was no one who took a closer look at its financial behavior. “We have failed to carry out the internal party task of clarifying things and clearing the air. This flaw remains.”