Wolfgang Schäuble, the German politician who helped forge European unity, dies at the age of 81

Wolfgang Schäuble, one of the most influential and combative political figures in post-war West Germany and who played a central role in his country’s reunification with the communist east and in the subsequent projection of economic power, died on Tuesday. He was 81.

His death was announced by the German parliament, the Bundestag.

Mr. Schäuble’s uncompromising financial accuracy was revered by debt-averse Germans. But it was reviled by citizens of poorer, more profligate countries in southern Europe, where he used Berlin’s enormous economic power to impose unpopular austerity measures to protect the common euro.

For a number of years before and after the reunification of Germany in October 1990, Mr Schäuble was widely seen as Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s heir apparent. Even after a would-be assassin opened fire on him just days after the reunion, wounding him in the face and chest and causing spinal damage that condemned him to a life in a wheelchair, he harbored ambitions to take down Mr. Kohl to follow. In the late 1990s, he even publicly raised the question of whether Germans could elect a politician who uses a wheelchair as chancellor. The shooter, Dieter Kaufmann, was later declared mentally ill by judges.

After Mr. Kohl lost the 1998 national election, Mr. Schäuble (SHOY-bleh) succeeded him as leader of the conservative Christian Democratic Union, or CDU. But a year later the party became embroiled in a scandal involving illegal political donations.

The fallout has been especially damaging to Mr. Kohl, but Mr. Schäuble was forced to resign in 2000 after admitting that he had received a cash donation of 100,000 Deutsche Marks, or $52,000, in 1994 from Karlheinz Schreiber, an arms dealer and lobbyist.

Mr. Schäuble denied that he had illegally hidden the money, but his departure, along with Mr. Kohl’s fall from grace, decapitated the CDU’s old guard, giving Angela Merkel the chance to take over as party leader . She became Germany’s first female Chancellor after the 2005 elections and held this position until 2021.

The scandal drew a bitter line under the once close relationship between Mr. Kohl and Mr. Schäuble, and the two men rarely spoke to each other anymore. It was a sign of Schäuble’s perceived importance at the heart of German and European decision-making that Mrs Merkel rehabilitated him in the run-up to the 2005 elections and later appointed him Interior Minister – a position he had held under the Mr Schäuble. Kohl.

In the years after the September 11 attacks on the United States in 2001, when European and German officials feared a possible attack on their own soil, Mr. Schäuble earned a reputation as a hardliner on terrorism. He advocated laws that would allow German security forces to shoot down hijacked planes and kill suspected foreign terrorists.

Opponents who supported Germany’s postwar defense of individual rights accused him of rekindling the kind of oppression that characterized Germany’s historical experience with both Nazism and Communism.

However, it was as finance minister from 2009 to 2017 that Mr Schäuble achieved his greatest fame in European circles as an unyielding enforcer of the strict fiscal regime underpinning the single currency.

A full obituary will be published shortly.