Firm elder statesman

AGED 72 and confined to a wheelchair since an assassination attempt 25 years ago, Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany’s finance minister, has the political energy of a younger man. In Washington this month for the IMF/World Bank meetings, he rushed from one podium to another. Everywhere the question was whether Greece will have to leave the euro. That is not up to him but to Athens, he notes, with a well-rehearsed shrug. But the omens are not good, he reckons, because the new far-left Greek government refuses to commit to the reforms previously promised in return for bail-outs. Nobody wants “Grexit”, he says. But if it comes, so be it.

Since late 2009 he has managed the euro crisis alongside his boss, Chancellor Angela Merkel. Mr Schäuble, who is impatient of foreign criticism, is convinced that his prescribed medicine for crisis countries—structural reforms and fiscal austerity—is working. Everywhere, that is, except in Greece since January, when Alexis Tsipras took over as prime minister and Yanis Varoufakis as finance minister (see article). Mr Schäuble seems at his wits’ end with the Greek duo, feeling they have been evasive and manipulative in negotiations. A more delicate line was crossed when the newspaper of Mr Tsipras’s party depicted Mr Schäuble as a Nazi threatening, in Greek, to “make soap out of your fat”.

His image as the embodiment of toughness towards a fellow member of the European Union is in some ways surprising. In Germany he has always been seen as one of the old (West) German guard of European federalists, prepared to cede German sovereignty for deeper integration. For his pro-European efforts he even won the EU’s Charlemagne Prize in 2012. He often talks of his post-war childhood years in the Black Forest, then occupied by the French. The family took a French soldier into its home, and he formed his first Franco-German friendship.

Trained as a tax lawyer, he entered parliament as a centre-right Christian Democrat in 1972. That makes him the Bundestag’s longest-serving member. In the 1980s he became chief of staff to Chancellor Helmut Kohl. In 1990, as interior minister, it was he who negotiated the treaty of German unification, the zenith of his career. Only nine days after unification, an insane man shot him in the face and spine at a campaign event. He was paralysed from the waist down. But the tragedy brought out his grit. Within three months he was back at work.

The next year he gave what many consider the speech of his life, an emotional plea to the Bundestag to move the capital from Bonn to Berlin. He became his party’s whip in parliament. As such he stayed resolutely loyal to Mr Kohl, on the understanding that he was heir-apparent and would be the party’s next candidate for chancellor. But Mr Kohl refused to step down and then lost the 1998 election. When Mr Schäuble at last became party leader, a scandal broke over anonymous political donations. Mr Kohl refused to clear things up, leaving Mr Schäuble high and dry. Another Christian Democrat, Angela Merkel, then working for Mr Schäuble as party general secretary, chose this moment to strike. Announcing her coup in a newspaper article, she ousted Mr Schäuble and became party leader in 2000.

For years their relationship was frosty, especially after Mrs Merkel crossed him a second time in 2004, when she failed to back his candidacy for president. But when Mrs Merkel became chancellor in 2005, she brought Mr Schäuble into her cabinet. As the euro fell ill, so did he, after complications from new medicines forced him in 2010 to be driven from a Brussels summit to hospital. Repeatedly bedridden, he offered his resignation. Mrs Merkel did not accept it. The pair had developed their own kind of mutual trust.

In his characteristic south-western dialect, where every “s” becomes “sh”, Mr Schäuble has always spoken plain truth. “A cripple as chancellor? One must ask this question,” he said in 1997. Today he watches Germany’s purse and has become the first finance minister since 1969 to balance the federal budget. And he wants the Greeks also to obey the rules. Any additional money to Greece would have to pass the Bundestag, where scepticism runs high among Mr Schäuble’s own Christian Democrats. Without his nod of approval, there will be no deal. As one Christian Democrat in parliament puts it: “Schäuble, not Merkel, is our weather-vane.”