Former German Finance Minister German politicanone of the most important figures in all of Europe during the euro crisis has died at the age of 81, his family reported to the DPA news agency on Wednesday.
Schäuble was one of the best-known figures in Angela Merkel’s government, although he most recently served as president of the Bundestag – the lower house of the German parliament – between 2017 and 2021.
He was a member of the Bundestag for 51 years and was once suggested as a possible successor Helmut Kohl in the Foreign Ministry, thanks to a political experience that had already taken him to several positions, including that of Interior Minister.
In 1990, when he was in charge of the interior, he was the victim of an assassination attempt that left him in a wheelchair due to a gunshot wound, but did not stop him from political work, where he remained under Merkel’s leadership and continued to hold office.
The incumbent Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Social Democrat Olaf Scholz, remembered Schäuble as a figure who shaped the country for more than half a century and lamented that Germany was losing a politician, a thinker and a democrat.
The chairman of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Friedrich MerzHe also expressed his “sadness” about the news on social media. “I lost that best friend and advisor I ever had in politics. “My thoughts are with his family, especially his wife Ingeborg,” he said.