Wolfgang Schäuble, former German finance minister, dies at 81

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Germany’s former finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble died on Tuesday evening at the age of 81, a spokesperson for the centre-right Christian Democrats said.

The conservative politician is best known internationally for his role as an ardent advocate of fiscal austerity during the euro area debt crisis a decade ago.

Schäuble shaped Germany’s hawkish response to the crisis, arguing against bailouts and in favour of spending cuts and structural reforms, a stance that made him a controversial figure in Greece and other affected countries.

At home, Schäuble was a towering political figure for more than half a century. A staunch supporter of European integration, he became a member of the Christian Democrats (CDU) in 1965 and first entered the Bundestag seven years later, becoming one of the youngest members of parliament at the time. He held his seat continually until his death, becoming the Bundestag’s longest-serving member.

Schäuble was a wheelchair user after suffering life-threatening injuries in an assassination attempt days after Germany’s reunification in 1990, when a man with a history of mental illness shot him three times at a campaign event.

“Germany has lost a sharp thinker, passionate politician and pugnacious democrat,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz wrote on social media site X.

CDU leader Friedrich Merz said on X that he had lost “the dearest friend and adviser I’ve ever had in politics”.

A trained lawyer who grew up in the Black Forest in the prosperous south-west of Germany, Schäuble became an early supporter and close confidant of late German chancellor Helmut Kohl.

From 1984, he held a variety of ministerial roles and in 1990 negotiated the international treaty that opened the door to German reunification.

Subsequently he became one of the most influential advocates of moving the capital from Bonn to Berlin. At the time he was seen as the most likely successor to Kohl as chancellor, but he was pushed aside by Angela Merkel in 2000 when the party was shaken by a scandal over illegal party funding.

Five years later, when the CDU returned to power, Merkel appointed Schäuble as interior minister in her first government. He later served as finance minister from 2009 to 2017, playing a pivotal role during the eurozone debt crisis.

He advocated against bailouts of debt-stricken countries such as Greece, arguing that such policies only led to “short-term volatile bursts or long-term economic decline”. Schäuble argued that governments “faced with high levels of debt and deficits need to cut expenditures, increase revenues and remove the structural hindrances in their economies”.

Following his death, European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde wrote on X that “he was one of the most influential European leaders of his generation”, adding that she “personally witnessed his commitment to Europe, his intellectual rigour and his statesmanship”.