Wolfgang Schäuble: Merkel's hard-working finance minister dies at the age of 81

Former German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, who helped guide the eurozone through the debt crisis, has died at the age of 81.

He was a Member of Parliament for 51 years in the German Bundestag, and played a key role in negotiating the reunification of Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Then he survived an assassination attempt at the hands of a mentally ill gunman.

Although he never served as Chancellor, Schäuble was widely regarded as one of the most influential politicians in post-war Germany.

Current Chancellor Olaf Scholz said he had helped shape his country for more than half a century, and that Germany had lost “a sharp thinker, a passionate politician and a feisty democrat.”

Angela Merkel, who served in her government for 12 years, said that when she was a young minister, Wolfgang Schäuble was her “political mentor.”

Posting on X, formerly Twitter, Former UK Chancellor George Osborne praised Schäuble as “a great man who united his country and was the last German after the war.”

But for many Greeks, he was a hated figure during the eurozone debt crisis, as the architect of the deeply unpopular austerity program imposed on their country. Former Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis said history “will judge him harshly.”

Wolfgang Schäuble joined the conservative CDU in 1965 and entered the Bundestag seven years later when he was thirty years old.

As West German Interior Minister, he co-signed the treaty in East Berlin that unified the country in August 1990. He later described reunification as “the pinnacle of my political career.”

Nine days after Germany's official reunification, he was shot in the spinal cord and jaw while campaigning, and used a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

He returned to the public stage months later with an enthusiastic call to move the capital of the unified state from Bonn to Berlin.

He continued to lead the CDU in 1998, until Angela Merkel took office in 2000 amid the party's donations scandal.

When she became German chancellor in 2005, she appointed him first as interior minister and then as finance minister, where he spent eight years focusing on balancing the German budget.

He achieved what is called Germany Schwarzei null Or the black zero budget deficit in 2014 and was widely seen as the driving force behind the austerity policies adopted by the Eurozone in response to the debt crisis that began in 2008.

“The Greek debt crisis and the crises it has generated constitute a clear warning to European policymakers not to allow public debt to accumulate indefinitely,” he told the European Parliament in 2011.

His no-nonsense approach to the eurozone crisis led him to propose a “deadline” for Greece to exit the euro, although Athens rejected that proposal.

With Greece receiving three international bailout loans, taxes rose, salaries and pensions fell, and unemployment rates skyrocketed.

Schäuble left the government in 2017 and became President of the Bundestag. He was the longest serving MP, winning 14 constituency elections.

In a speech to the European Parliament four years ago, Wolfgang Schäuble said that without the unification of Europe, east and west, German reunification would not have been possible, and he warned that “the rules-based international order is under pressure.”

He withdrew from front-line politics only last year.