Wolfgang Schaeuble resembled a commanding political figure in both Germany and Europe.
WOLFGANG SCHAEUBLE
The former German ambassador to Athens during the challenging period from 2014 to 2017, Dr Peter Schoof reflects on the recent passing of Wolfgang Schaeuble.
Before the tumultuous year of 2015, Greece actually came close to leaving the eurozone in 2012, following the election of Antonis Samaras as prime minister.
I met Wolfgang Schaeuble twice. The first one was in 2017, literally on his last day as Finance Minister. As I was entering the ministry building, they were moving boxes containing his archives, which made me wonder how many documents related to Greece were among them. Some people who knew him well had warned me […]
There was no need for Wolfgang Schaeuble to depart this futile world for us to grasp that he was despised by a section of the Greek population.
Wolfgang Schaeuble assumed the role of Germany’s finance minister in late October 2009, serving in this capacity for a full eight years.
Without Wolfgang Schaeuble’s strong political presence, it is doubtful that the eurozone would have been able to face the monumental challenge of an economic crisis within its own borders and, above all, cope with the Greek crisis by taking initiatives that went beyond the narrow framework of the Treaties and required the allocation of hefty funds.
“I can now observe my life as it comes to an end. I find it exciting to observe myself,” Wolfgang Schaeuble, Germany’s former finance minister, said in one of the last interviews he gave before his death on Tuesday.
Wolfgang Schaeuble was an emblem in German politics, one of the pioneers of European integration, a catalyst in the unification of the two Germanies – he probably made it happen on the economic front – and, of course, one of Europe’s longest-serving MPs, having served in the Bundestag for more than 50 years.
One of the key figures of the 2009-2018 Greek debt crisis, Germany’s former finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, died on Tuesday.
Wolfgang Schaeuble, who helped negotiate German reunification in 1990 and as finance minister was a central figure in the austerity-heavy effort to drag Europe out of its debt crisis more than two decades later, has died. He was 81.
[nx_login_form]x
