‘I was almost a little amused.’ Schäuble’s posthumous memoirs reveal a proposal to overthrow Merkel

Few politicians can boast a career like that of the German conservative Wolfgang Schäuble. He spent half a century as a parliamentarian and was important figure in the governments of Helmut Kohl and Angela Merkel. His name is linked to two crucial moments in modern German history in which he played a key role: German reunification and the European debt crisis. Now, in his posthumous memoirs, published this Monday, he gives details about the scandal of illegal financing of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) that led to Kohl’s fall from grace and does not hesitate to talk about plots to depose both Merkel and Kohl.

The attempt to seize the leadership from Merkel came after the 2015 refugee crisis, when Edmund Stoiber — already out of office at the head of the Christian Social Union, a sister party of the CDU — encouraged Schäuble to do so. “He wanted to convince me to overthrow Merkel to become chancellor myself,” he comments on something he also refused on this occasion out of “loyalty,” but also for strategic reasons. Stabbing Merkel in the back, in his opinion, would have caused serious long-term damage to the CDU “without really solving the problem.”

Although Schäuble was generous in his shows of respect for Merkel, he did not skimp on criticism either. He acknowledged the chancellor’s intellect. However, tensions between the two became evident during the Greek sovereign debt and eurozone crises, where he embodied the rigor of the strict austerity policy imposed by Germany on the European Union. Merkel did not share his ideas on financial and monetary policy, and finally reached “the limit of what is bearable.” The Minister of Finance at that time — from 2009 to 2017 — even considered leaving his position at some point due to the lack of Merkel’s support at crucial moments.

“The whole debate almost amused me a little, because I knew my age, I had been a paraplegic for more than a quarter of a century, and I was generally in poor health,” says the politician who, as minister of the interior, survived an assassination attempt in 1990 perpetrated during a campaign event.

The more than 600 pages of the volume are the legacy of a historic politician who died in December 2023 at the age of 81, having left politics in 2021, when the social democrat Olaf Scholz took over the Chancellery. Under the title of Wolfgang Schäuble: Memories. My life in politics, the former champion of austerity reviews his political career that coincides with such important events as the fight against terrorism by the Red Army Faction (RAF) in the 1970s and 1980s; the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989; and the 2008 financial crisis, when, in his opinion, his effort managed to “make the euro more stable than many believed possible” by imposing harsh public spending cut programs. “Not only have Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and Cyprus been able to survive the crisis, but Greece is also doing remarkably well today,” he says of some countries in which he became one of the public’s most hated villains. Towards the end of his tenure, he was also a key player in Germany’s response to the refugee crisis of 2015.

Born in a small town in Baden-Württemberg, southern Germany, in September 1942, Schäuble acknowledges that the experience of being born during the war did not influence him as much as growing up in the early years of West Germany. “Without a doubt, the Cold War has marked my political thinking to this day,” the politician wrote, his eyes fixed on the images of tanks through the streets of Berlin.

Raised in a conservative family in which there was a lot of discussion about politics, which, as he acknowledges, “marked him for life,” he began his law studies in 1961 and soon ended up in politics and entered the German parliament in 1972. Thus he began a long career in which he held such important positions as head of the chancellery, minister of the interior, minister of finance, president of the Bundestag, and leader of the CDU and the conservative parliamentary group.

Schäuble remembers how in his early years, he was often accused of being an “ambitious careerist” and of coldly calculating his steps to climb the to the next step, which is something he categorically rejects. His career led him to become an important figure in the Helmut Kohl’s government (1982-1998), as minister of the interior the main negotiator of the document that would make German reunification possible in 1990. He served as president of the CDU between 1998 and 2000, since he was forced to leave after the party’s illegal financing scandal came to light. Regarding this dark chapter in the history of the CDU, Schäuble details that a “black box” already existed in the conservative parliamentary group before coming to power.

“Kohl had created the account during his time as chairman of the parliamentary group, as a reserve outside the party’s finances,” he writes. “The appeal of this ‘slush fund’ was due to the simple fact that the Federal Court of Accounts did not control party financing at that time.” Kohl had taken advantage of this loophole and spoke half-jokingly of his “war chest.” He later admitted to having received some two million Deutsche Marks for the party in the 1990s without declaring it as a donation, but never revealed the names of his alleged donors.

The scandal plunged the party into the worst crisis in its history and also affected Schäuble. Moreover, prior to the 1998 elections, he had considered the possibility of removing Kohl, as requested by colleagues within the party. Schäuble’s personal battle for leadership failed on principle. “I owed my career to Helmut Kohl, and I had been part of his success. My word that I would not betray him was true.” In the end, members recognized that the party could not overthrow Kohl “without self-destructive consequences.”

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