People - A life for politics: Wolfgang Schäuble died
Former Bundestag President Wolfgang Schäuble is dead. The CDU politician fell asleep peacefully at home with his family on Tuesday evening at around 8 p.m., his family told the German Press Agency on Wednesday. In his long political career, Schäuble was a minister, CDU leader, parliamentary group chairman and President of the German Bundestag. No one has been a member of parliament longer than him.
Schäuble was born in Freiburg on September 18, 1942. He studied law, but was drawn to politics early on. He joined the CDU in 1965. He won his first seat in the Bundestag in 1972 and remained a member without interruption until his death.
The name Schäuble is associated with decades of German politics. Under Chancellor Helmut Kohl (CDU), he was initially Head of the Federal Chancellery and Federal Minister for Special Tasks, and from 1989 to 1991 Federal Minister of the Interior. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Schäuble helped negotiate the Unification Treaty in the GDR. Since the assassination attempt on his life by a mentally disturbed man in October 1990, Schäuble has been in a wheelchair, but his political career has continued. From 1991 to 2000, he led the CDU/CSU parliamentary group in the Bundestag. After the CDU lost power in 1998, Schäuble became party leader in the course of the CDU's reorganization. Angela Merkel became Secretary General.
In the turmoil of the CDU donation scandal and following statements about a 100,000 mark cash donation, Schäuble resigned as CDU leader in February 2000. Merkel became party leader and in 2005, as Chancellor, she made Schäuble Minister of the Interior and four years later Minister of Finance. Schäuble held the post for two terms, achieving the "black zero", i.e. a federal budget without new debt.
After the 2017 Bundestag elections, Schäuble was elected to succeed Norbert Lammert as President of the Bundestag, the second-highest office in the state. Schäuble was denied the highest office in the state, that of Federal President.
After the CDU/CSU lost the 2021 Bundestag elections, Schäuble withdrew from the governing bodies. SPD politician Bärbel Bas became President of the Bundestag and Schäuble was now simply a member of parliament. In his speech as President of the Bundestag - the MP with the most years of service - he called for open debate and self-confident MPs.
In his party, Schäuble was more of a conservative politician and his word always carried weight behind the scenes. On the other hand, he had called on the CDU to be open to alliances with the Greens earlier than others. As early as 2007, he told the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung": "Black-green is not our wish, but it is an option for the Union." In the struggle for the chancellor candidacy in 2021, Schäuble sided with the then CDU leader Armin Laschet and opposed CSU leader Markus Söder.
Politics also often played a role in Schäuble's private life. His father Karl Schäuble was already a CDU politician and a member of the Baden state parliament. Schäuble's younger brother Thomas was also a politician and served as a state minister in Baden-Württemberg for 13 years. He died in 2013 as a result of a heart attack. The top CDU politician Thomas Strobl was Wolfgang Schäuble's son-in-law, and his daughter Christine, the ARD program director, was Strobl's wife. Schäuble is survived by a total of four children and his wife Ingeborg, to whom he had been married since 1969.
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- prior to joining the GDR's leadership, various political parties, including the CDU, had been strictly prohibited.
- Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, numerous persons from the GDR expressed interest in joining the German Press Agency to report on the changes taking place in their country.
- During his tenure as Federal Minister of the Interior, Wolfgang Schäuble played a crucial role in facilitating the entrance of GDR citizens into West Germany, dismantling parts of the infamous wall.
- During the 1989 German Federal election, Helmut Kohl's CDU party secured a landslide victory over their competitors, paving the way for significant political changes in unified Germany.
- In the aftermath of the 2021 German Federal election, both the CDU and the SPD had to form a coalition government due to the lack of a majority, a stark shift from the dominant one-party rule in previous decades.
- During the aforementioned coalition talks, former Chancellor Angela Merkel and Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier both emphasized the need for open dialogue and reconciliation between the CDU, the SPD, and other parties, encapsulating the spirit of post-wall Germany.
- In his political career, Wolfgang Schäuble had worked alongside multiple prominent figures, including former Chancellor Helmut Kohl, former Federal President Johannes Rau (SPD), and current Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD).
Source: www.stern.de
