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DISAPPEARANCE – The former Finance Minister, who served as a member of the Bundestag for more than 50 years, died “peacefully” asleep on Tuesday evening. He was 81 years old.
Correspondent in Berlin
Until almost his last breath, Wolfgang Schäuble walked the corridors of power, escorted by an assistant. The former President of the Bundestag and veteran of German politics died on Tuesday December 26 at the age of 81, his family said in a message sent on Wednesday. From Parliament to the various governments of which he was a member, this familiar figure of Angela Merkel’s CDU will have marked twenty-five years of national political life, and, even removed from business, his word counted, in the same way as that of the presidents of a Federal Republic that he helped to reunify.
From his time at the Ministry of Finance; he will keep a nickname: “ Mister Schwarz Null » (Mr. Zero Black), the man who hates debt. In recent weeks, he was nevertheless worried about the consequences of the Constitutional Court’s judgment which shattered the country’s budgetary practices and reinforced the orthodoxy of public finance management.
Austerity policy
“A provincial from the hinterland” : this was how his American counterpart Larry Summers, the Secretary of Finance, considered him, speaking of this man who simply graduated in law with a vague economic background, speaking poor English in the middle of the G8 caste. Grandson of a carpenter, Wolfgang Schäuble was originally from Baden-Württemberg, more precisely from the Black Forest, where he died “peacefully” in his house in Offenburg. “I feel lonely”, he recently confided to Spiegelcontemplating with detachment the disappearance of a political generation.
Under Helmut Kohl, he worked for reunification as Minister of the Interior, a time when his personal life was turned upside down in 1990 when an insane person shot him, leaving him paraplegic. When social democrat Gerhard Schröder came to power, he took over as president of the CDU group in the Bundestag before Angela Merkel called him to finance for two terms (from 2009 to 2017).
There he will lead an austerity policy which will make him the bête noire of Italy and especially of Greece, from which he sought in vain to obtain exclusion from the euro zone. He will benefit from a decade of prosperity that he will work to make profitable, to boost the economies of Europe’s leading economy, without ever worrying about public investments, at the risk of leaving telecoms and transport infrastructures in a state of disrepair. pitiful state. Since 2017, he chaired the Bundestag until his departure following the last legislative elections.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz welcomed “intellect and taste for democratic debate” manifested by Wolfgang Schäuble, while recalling “the conservative view of the world” maintained by this Protestant member of the Christian Democratic Party. “He was a great statesman and embodied democratic post-war Germany like few others”commented Interior Minister Nancy Faeser.