Goodbye to Schauble, the Thin Doctor of German politics
Wolfgang Schäuble, the last great old man of German politics, has died at 81. Words, works and legacy of Dr. Sottile of Germany
His secret was all there, in that nervous anger with which he pushed the rims of the wheelchair that had supported him for more than thirty years, since that cursed autumn night in Oppenau in 1990, a stone's throw from home and a few days from the reunification party, when at the end of an electoral meeting a deranged man fired three gunshots at him, paralyzing him for the rest of his life.
Yesterday, Wolfgang Schäuble, the last great old man of German politics, died at 81, taking with him the last traces of a political season that can no longer be repeated. But until the end he almost never allowed someone from the staff to push him in the wheelchair along the corridors. It was he who, one blow after another, gave the wheels a nervous rhythm, never the same, never banal. The others were allowed at most to kindly open some doors for him, to discreetly escort him along the way, never to lighten his burden of fatigue. He obtained a lot from that politics to which he dedicated his entire existence, but the impression he conveyed to the outside world was that of a man who still feels credit: Schäuble was the Thin Doctor of German politics, to which fate had always denied the opportunity to land the decisive blow.
FATE AND CHARACTER OF SCHÄUBLE
Years ago, when his image abroad, or rather above all abroad, was linked to his role as Berlin Treasury Minister in the euro storm, the first German public network dedicated a long documentary to him shot by journalist Stephan Lamby (Wolfgang Schäuble, Macht und Ohnmacht, power and impotence), which glued two and a half million viewers to the television screens. It was in fact a sort of tribute-summary of an interminable political career. In the final moments of that interview, the former Finance Minister took stock of himself: "I have always been a particularly uncomfortable soldier." This is perhaps what the Anglo-Saxons would call his legacy.
Destiny and character intertwined on his path, the former shaped by the latter. And it is surprising that someone with such a rough and independent character managed to keep himself afloat alongside equally strong and ambitious politicians like Helmut Kohl and Angela Merkel, especially at a time when the paths, instead of running parallel, began to collide.
From the beginning his path in politics appeared that of a predestined. Until 1990, an uninterrupted climb to the top levels of power: from entering the Bundestag in 1972 to leading the parliamentary group, then from 1984 alongside Kohl as head of the Chancellery and then Minister of the Interior in his third government . From that ministry, in 1990, he directed the negotiations for reunification and signed the treaty that sanctioned it. Three months after the attack, the immobility and, in the words of his best biographer, the journalist Hans Peter Schütz, the beginning of his second life. Which led him at the end of the Nineties to experience the twilight of the Kohl era, to manage the slush fund scandal as president of the CDU, to parry the resentful backlash of his former mentor and to suffer the unstoppable rise of Angela Merkel, the outsider whom he himself had promoted to his side as general secretary of the party.
Falls that seemed to mark his end every time: blows of fate, as in the case of the attack, or outcomes of political battles always played without a safety net, like a tightrope walker precariously balanced on a tightrope held up by pride, arrogance, loyalty, naivety, tenacity, presumption. All ingredients that made this man, although considered in the years of the euro crisis a cold executor of the dogma of austerity, one of the few politicians capable of looking beyond the short space of an electoral competition.
And just as the game on the Greek crisis seemed at that stage almost an exclusive tug of war between him and Yannis Varoufakis, the "prof influencer" who Sipras threw to the lions before being tamed, the other fundamental moments of Schäuble's political career they were marked by other personal comparisons: with Helmut Kohl, with Angela Merkel. Meetings and clashes of personalities and powers, experienced with passion by a professional politician, a thoroughbred as it was once called: an ambitious intellectual who failed to make the leap to the highest step, the chancellery.
Year 2000. The slush funds scandal at the CDU also affects him, because he very badly handles the accusation of having received 100 thousand marks in contributions for the party in 1994 from the arms dealer Karlheinz Schreiber, which were never registered. Called to give an account in front of the Bundestag, he confuses himself with dates and memories, appears reticent, makes false statements. “As a party leader, I also had to deal with issues that were not nice to find on the front pages of the newspapers,” he later admitted.
Schäuble has never been a stranger to the burning events of the CDU, ever since he had to manage the consequences of the Flick affair, a scandal of undeclared contributions which affected all German parties in the 1980s, excluding the Greens. “Sometimes you have to get your hands dirty,” he said. The concept was that democracy and politics have costs, the belief (very twentieth century) is that it was also possible for the party to derogate from the rules. It was surprising to hear this from someone who was Finance Minister of a country that in Europe always places the emphasis on respect for the rules. “It was a mistake”, he said with reference to the slush fund scandal of 2000, “they are experiences that one accumulates in life, knowing that they will remain in his CV forever”. He then apologized for his personal case, admitted his share of responsibility, announced a new party congress and gave up running for president again.
It was April 2000: Angela Merkel took the lead of the CDU, Schäuble retreated to the second row. He never stopped thinking that behind the scenes of the rumors about the Schreiber case, which ended up in the newspapers like clockwork, a rancorous Helmut Kohl was at work. The two never exchanged a word from then on. It was in Ard's documentary that Schäuble made one final thrust: Kohl didn't tell the truth about the slush funds. He had claimed the existence of a secret donor, whose name he did not want to reveal for a matter of honor. “There was no one,” said Schäuble, “slush funds had existed for a long time.”
The connection with Angela Merkel was different. There was not the complicity of the relationship with Kohl, but distance and mutual respect. She had overtaken him in the race to lead the party, but then fished him out of oblivion into which he risked disappearing. And he was able to carve out his own space in that cold relationship with the first woman to lead a German government. When Merkel reversed her immigration policy, opening the doors to over a million refugees from the Middle East, Schäuble had her back, giving depth to a political turn: "It is the revenge of globalization, immigration is a challenge to which we cannot escape", he said in various public speeches.
Before leaving the scene of active politics, Schäuble became president of the Bundestag, covering a super partes institutional role with wisdom and authority. He finished it to everyone's recognition. It wasn't obvious. “I am 43 years older than the boy who appeared in the Bundestag in 1972,” he said in an interview in recent years, “I face hardships that I once did not feel and public life has left me with many scars. I am a loyal man but I have never been a conformist."
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/wolfgang-schauble-morte-81-anni/ on Wed, 27 Dec 2023 09:59:03 +0000.