Wolfgang Schäuble once said that he became the party's candidate for parliament out of sheer desperation – the Christian Democrats didn't know who else to run for in Offenburg. It was 1972, and he was barely thirty years old.
When he died in Berlin this Tuesday, Schäuble was still an MP. He was constantly in the Bundestag for more than half a century and it is hard to imagine that German home without him.
Admittedly, the iron soldier of the party and a close associate of two legendary chancellors - Helmut Kohl and Angela Merkel - was twice the minister of the interior and the minister of finance. But, in Germany, the minister remains a member of parliament, so the record is recorded.
It leaves behind the so-called "black zero" - the constitutional rule that the state may not borrow. That's what the thrifty Schäuble pushed with all his might. And there remains the career of a politician who knew how to look beyond daily events.
Never a chancellor candidate
In October 1990, Germany was reunified - Schäuble was considered one of the architects of that unification. But they will remember those days quite differently.
A few days later, he was at a meeting in an inn in Oppenau when a mentally disturbed man shot him. He was shot in the back and jaw. He remained motionless, and the dislocated jaw gave his face an unusual sharpness ever since.
The assassination marked him forever, but it did not stop him. In his wheelchair, Schäuble just pushed on, with undiminished ferocity.
Schäuble was supposed to be the Christian Democratic Union's candidate for chancellor in 1998, but the aging reunification chancellor Helmut Kohl wanted to run another race.
He overdid it and lost the 1998 elections to Gerhard Schröder, and the Pride party got involved in a donation scandal. Kol admitted that he took millions of marks for the black party coffers, but he took the secret from whom he took all the money to the grave.
Loyal associate of the chancellor
Although Schäuble also knew something, he took over the party from Kohl and appointed a promising politician from the east, a certain Angela Dorothea Merkel, as general secretary.
But she was never a sickly woman, although she was nicknamed "German Mom". In an author's article for a newspaper, just before Christmas 1999, Isokola also attacked Schäuble because of the affair and thus forced him to hand over the leadership of the party to her.
Schäuble knew it was better that way. If he resented her, it didn't show. "I'm not easy to maintain, I'm not pleasant, but I am loyal," he once said.
WikiLeaks releases showed that US diplomats wrote in cables that Schäuble was an "angry old man". That was his image.
He spent years as the faithful finance minister of the famous chancellor, on her behalf he disciplined the deputies during the debt crisis of Greece, he chased after the younger and completely different Yanis Varoufakis.
In those years, he managed to anchor a positive zero in the Constitution - a ban on borrowing the country, even when it is favorable, which caused the left part of the political scene to tear its hair out.
"If you take loans in bad times, then in good times you have to pay them back," said Schäuble.
Transferred to the sixth bench
At the end of his impressive career, he was the president of the parliament, where he was caught by the corona pandemic. While his party comrades were calling for a strict lockdown, with the support of the opposition, he was one of the few who said:
"When I hear that everything else has to take a back seat to the protection of life, then I have to say - in such an absolutist way, that is not true." He added that the German Constitution in its first sentence assumes something else for everything - dignity. "And it does not rule out that we must all die."
His speeches in recent years have been more and more free, less and less partisan, and more general. "By the way, that's the advantage of getting older - you gain freedom."
He ended up staying in politics longer than Merkel. And when she was already walking towards retirement, Schäuble's words were heard in the party. He insisted that the Christian Democrats' candidate for chancellor be Armin Laschet, not the Bavarian conservative Markus Zeder.
That was a bad assessment, in 2021 Laschet was convincingly defeated by Olaf Scholz and the Social Democrats.
As a member of parliament, Schäuble was only moved to the sixth row of the parliamentary benches, he had to make room for others. "I'm ready for that and I don't mind at all," he said.
He died at the age of 81. His family said he just "fell peacefully asleep."
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