Wolfgang Schäuble’s achievements and ambivalent fiscal legacy remembered

As Germany bade farewell to Wolfgang Schäuble on Friday, the 81-year-old would have been delighted to know that his last political achievement – austerity politics and balanced budgets – was dominating the headlines and the political agenda.

Nine days after he died of cancer, Schäuble’s family and friends gathered in his native Offenburg in southwestern Germany to remember a man described by Christine Strobl, one of his four children, as a “gesamtkunstwerk” – a complete, rounded work of art.

In his eulogy Friedrich Merz, the opposition Christian Democratic Union leader and a close friend, described the late politician as having a “will for optimism and a firm belief in the good people can do”.

For a record-breaking 52 years, Schäuble, born near the Black Forest and a lawyer by training, served as a Bundestag MP as well as minister, Bundestag president and, briefly, CDU leader.

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As West Germany’s federal interior minister in 1990, he shaped and signed off on Germany’s unity treaty – but had little time to celebrate his achievement. Just nine days after two Germanies became one, a mentally ill man shot him at close range. After days in a critical condition, Schäuble rallied but remained paralysed from the waist down and in a wheelchair.

Some 30 years later, with characteristic irony, he remarked: “Events like that give one a certain serenity in life.”

[ Derek Scally's Q &A with Wolfgang Schäuble in 2012 ]

Born in 1942 and raised in the ruins of postwar Germany, he was a lifelong believer in the EU as European countries’ common destiny. In 1994 he co-authored a paper warning that, without closer union around a “hard core” of France and Germany, the EU would decline into an “enhanced free trade zone [that] would not address the existential problems and external challenges facing European societies”.

Receiving the prestigious Charlemagne Prize in 2012, the conservative politician renewed his call for “instruments of varied integration” and “flexible geometry” in Europe.

Though his dream of closer Franco-German co-operation is currently more down than up, Schäuble remained a lifelong Francophile and, accepting a personal invitation from the late politician, French president Emmanuel Macron attended Friday’s funeral.

Among all Wolfgang Schäuble’s achievements, poor choices and bad timing ensured he was always the political best man but never the groom. In later life, his hopes of becoming mayor of Berlin and federal president went nowhere. And 25 years ago his loyalty to Helmut Kohl, long after the four-term chancellor’s political prime, shattered Schäuble’s dreams of becoming chancellor.

In 2000 he was dragged into a scandal over undeclared CDU donations and had to admit accepting a 100,000 Deutsche mark (about €50,000) cash donation from an arms dealer six years previously. Though the donation was lodged in the party books as “miscellaneous income”, he was caught out lying to parliament.

The revelation was a blow for a politician who traded on his integrity, and it created an opportunity for Angela Merkel, whom he had appointed CDU general secretary, to become party leader and, in 2005, chancellor.

Merkel, who stayed away from Friday’s funeral but will attend a state service in Berlin in three weeks’ time, tapped Schäuble twice for her cabinet table – first as a hardline interior minister and then, as the euro crisis raged, as an austerity-minded finance minister.

In this latter role he sparked outrage for suggesting that crisis-wracked Greece withdraw temporarily from the single currency. In a 2012 Irish Times interview, he insisted that Germany’s unpopular austerity medicine was already yielding results in Ireland, noting its sinking borrowing costs.

“Ireland had one of the most difficult situations yet is mastering it well,” he said. “It shows that Europe is a community with a common destiny – with each other and not against each other.”

In 2014, with a record tax take and spending cuts, he balanced Germany’s budget for the first time since 1969. Amid the cheers came jeers, likening him to Tolkien’s tragic, ring-obsessed Gollum: a politician whose paranoia about borrowing has left Germany with crumbling infrastructure and unfinanceable climate goals.

The austerity course Schäuble locked Germany in to as finance minister is now proving increasingly controversial, in particular thanks to the so-called debt brake.

This instrument limits German borrowing to 0.35 per cent of gross domestic product. Going far beyond tighter fiscal rules agreed in the euro crisis, the debt brake has many fans – but has destabilised the current German government.

In advance of Friday’s funeral, chancellor Olaf Scholz praised Schäuble for his “intellect and his joy at democratic debate”. Sparking less joy is the fiscal straitjacket Schäuble has bequeathed. Already, influential leftist voices in Scholz’s Social Democratic Party are demanding changes and a more flexible debt brake.

But they can expect robust opposition. Like conservative Catholic acolytes of the late pope Benedict, conservative CDU figures have vowed to defend Schäuble’s fiscal legacy to the end.

This unresolved, heated debate means that, even in death, Wolfgang Schäuble remains part of Germany’s great political game.