2023-12-27 22:03:01
by Paolo Valentino
He imposed a mandatory balanced budget in Berlin and tried to kick Greece out of the euro. He was never chancellor or president
He loved to compare himself to Sisyphus, the hero eternally condemned to push the boulder towards the top, only to then see it roll down and find it at the foot of the mountain. But he was the Sisyphus reinterpreted by Albert Camus, convinced that his effort was useless but absolutely necessary and therefore ultimately happy with that endless undertaking.
This was Wolfgang Schuble, the man who perhaps more than any other, after Helmut Kohl and Angela Merkel, has influenced, for better or for worse, the last 40 years of German and European history. An immovable giant of politics, Schuble played the most delicate roles and held the most important positions in Germany, but was denied the two highest goals, the chancellery and the presidency of the Republic, precisely by the two people to whom he had ultimately dedicated his life. life, literally dedicating oneself to sacrifice.
Great worker
He was, in fact, Kohl’s designated dolphin, after having been the true architect of the reunification. It was Schuble as Minister of the Interior of West Germany who negotiated (or rather imposed) the conditions for the merger with the GDR, working 18 hours a day to finalize every detail, from privatizations to restitutions, while his mentor flew on the wings of history.
He paid a very high price: on October 3, 1990, a deranged man shot him three times, leaving him paralyzed from the legs down and condemning him to a wheelchair forever. A month later he was already working at the ministry. But in 1998 Kohl, who had cried at his bedside, denied him the succession, running for the fifth time and giving the chancellorship to Gerhard Schrder.
Yet, he didn’t want to be Brutus: when a year later the slush fund scandal crucified the chancellor of reunification, Schuble initially chose to lie about the illicit donations to the CDU, which he had accepted at the request of Kohl, who tried to blame him for every responsibility. He had to resign as party president, leaving the leadership to Angela Merkel. From then on he never spoke to his mentor again.
When he returned to government in 2005, first at the helm of the Ministry of the Interior and then from 2009 of that of Finance, Wolfgang Schuble chose the role that would consign him to the history of those years: the grim face of Germany, the dark side of the force German, the most inflexible interpreter of austerity and respect for the rules of the Eurozone, theorist of a group of converging economies in which there was no room for the casual habits of Southern European countries.
Of course, Schuble has always had a pro-European heart. It couldn’t be different for someone who was born in Freiburg, he had learned French as a boy and had grown up in the myth of Paris. One evening at dinner in Berlin, I found myself sitting next to him and I asked him what the difference was between him and Chancellor Merkel on Europe: She doesn’t experience it emotionally, for Merkel Europe is just a rational project. And then you have a game theory approach to politics: you like negotiation for negotiation’s sake. This is why she often wins, but her steps are always small.
Schuble’s Europe has always been Carolingian, strongly connected and integrated into a hard core. He bore his signature on the plan that was supposed to put Greece out of the euro zone in 2015: Only temporarily, so that he could bring order and return to growth, he told me in one of the last interviews a few years ago. He had to stop in the face of resistance from Mario Draghi, who was convinced that it was not the ECB’s job to give an ultimatum to Athens. The polemical exchange between the two on the night of 11 July 2015 is famous, when Schuble asked him how long he intended to continue financing the Greek banks, keeping them afloat: I too would like to know more about your policies, but I’m not asking you and I expect the same confidentiality, Draghi replied. And then he lunged: If you want to kick Greece out of the euro, do it yourself, but don’t try to use the European Central Bank. In the end, Schuble obeyed Angela Merkel’s no. However, the chancellor has never rewarded her loyalty: as in 2010, when Schuble wanted to become president of the Republic, but Merkel blocked his path by preferring Christian Wulff, one of her internal opponents.
The two decisions
Schuble will remain tied to two decisions that are at the basis of Germany’s delay in public investments and are today creating enormous difficulties for the country system and Scholz’s government. The first was the Schuldenbremse, the budget brake inserted into the Constitution in 2009, which places a limit of 0.35 on the annual budget deficit, except in exceptional circumstances such as wars and pandemics. The other is the schwarze Null, the balanced budget, the place of the soul of legendary German thrift.
Ironic and brilliant, despite his condition, Schuble had an incredible attachment to life. He cultivated his passions such as opera and football. You could often meet him at a show at the Staatsoper, in his wheelchair: My advantage is that I don’t take away anyone’s seat, which is why I have no problem asking for a free ticket. I pay for my wife’s, he was joking. And as for football, one evening he even managed to take Angela Merkel to a pub to watch a Bayern Munich Champions League match together.
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December 27, 2023 (changed December 27, 2023 | 9:05 pm)
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