2024-04-10 23:56:46
Wolfgang Schäuble, one of the most influential German politicians of the past decades, died last December. Now the first excerpts from his memoirs have become public.
According to a media report, CDU politician Wolfgang Schäuble, who died at the end of 2023, was pressured by former CSU leader Edmund Stoiber during the refugee crisis in 2015 to overthrow then Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) in the refugee crisis. According to an advance report in the magazine “stern” on Wednesday, this emerges from Schäuble’s memoirs.
According to the report, Schäuble mentions a name for the first time in connection with plans for a coup during the refugee crisis in 2015. Stoiber became active “and encouraged (Horst) Seehofer, his successor in the prime minister’s office, in his attacks against Merkel,” according to the report in Schäuble’s still unpublished memoirs about the tensions within the Union. “And he wanted to persuade me to overthrow Merkel in order to become chancellor myself.”
Overthrow plan rejected
“I firmly rejected this. As with (Helmut) Kohl decades before, I remained convinced that the overthrow of our own chancellor could only harm our party in the long term without really solving the problem,” it continues, according to “stern”. That was his understanding of loyalty.
According to the report, Schäuble had already reported on plans to overthrow Merkel on the ZDF program “Markus Lanz” in December 2022, but did not mention any names. In his memoirs, according to “stern” he says: “The whole debate almost amused me a little, because I knew my age, had been paralyzed for more than a quarter of a century and had overall poor health.”
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“Appeals alone are of no use”
At the same time, Schäuble found words of praise for Merkel’s refugee policy in the preprint, but also criticism: he supported her to the best of his ability at the time and found the welcoming culture that emerged within German society at the beginning of the crisis to be correct. “Merkel’s sentence ‘We can do it!’, which she said at the end of August 2015 I thought it was right, I also adopted it in public statements.”
However, Schäuble criticized Merkel for not sufficiently explaining her refugee policy. “Unlike the Chancellor, I thought it was right to give the citizens pure wine and make it clear that working for the refugees also involves costs and sacrifices. Appeals alone are of no use.”
Differences in leadership styles
Overall, the Chancellor’s assessment of Schäuble is mixed. The fact that he did not include her among Germany’s three great chancellors caused a stir in the public. At the same time, Schäuble emphasized in the book that it was still too early to make a final assessment of Merkel’s term in office. “I had a fundamental sympathy for her and always liked her as a person. But it is also true that we both have very different views of what it means to lead politically.”
Schäuble died on December 26, 2023 at the age of 81. He has been a member of the Bundestag since 1972, was the Union parliamentary group leader, was a federal minister several times and was President of the Bundestag from 2017 to 2021.