Schäuble[1] was born in Freiburg im Breisgau, as the son of a tax
finance advisor. He is the middle brother of three.[2] After completing his Abitur in
1961, Schäuble studied law and economics at the University of Freiburg and the University of Hamburg, which he completed in
1966 and 1970 by passing the First and Second State Examinations respectively,
becoming a fully qualified lawyer.
In 1971 Schäuble obtained his
doctorate in law, with a dissertation called "The public accountant's
professional legal situation within accountancy firms".
Early career
Schäuble entered the tax
administration of the state of Baden-Württemberg, eventually becoming a senior
administration officer in the Freiburg tax office. Subsequently he became a
practising registered lawyer at the district court of Offenburg,
from 1978 to 1984.
Political career
Schäuble's political career
began in 1961 with him joining the Junge
Union ("Young Union"), the youth division of the CDU. During
his studies he served as chairman of the Ring Christlich-Demokratischer
Studenten (Association of Christian-Democrat Students, RCDS), in
Hamburg and Freiburg. In 1965 Schäuble also became a member of the CDU. From
1969 to 1972 he was district chairman of the Junge Union in South
Baden. From 1976 to 1984 he served as chairman of the CDU National
Committee for Sport.
After the CDU was defeated in
the 1998 federal election, Schäuble
succeeded Helmut Kohl as chairman of the CDU. Only 15 months
later,[3] he resigned from this post as well as from the
leadership of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group in 2000 in the wake of the party financing scandal, over the
acceptance of cash donation over DM 100,000 contributed by the arms dealer and
lobbyist Karlheinz Schreiber back in 1994.[4] Schäuble's resignation initiated a generational
change among the Christian Democrats, with Angela
Merkel taking over as CDU leader and Friedrich
Merz as chairman of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group.[5]
Member of Parliament
Schäuble has been a member of
the Bundestag
since 1972. From 1981 to 1984 he was
parliamentary whip of the CDU/CSU group
and in November 1991 he became its chairman. Schäuble gave up this position in
2000 as another consequence of the financing scandal. Since October 2002
Schäuble has been deputy chairman of the CDU/CSU.
Schäuble has always been
elected to the Bundestag by means of winning an electorate seat, rather than
through a list placing in Germany's system of proportional political
representation.
Public office
Federal Minister for Special Affairs, 1984–1989
On 15 November 1984 Schäuble
was appointed as Minister for Special
Affairs and head of the Chancellery by Chancellor Helmut Kohl. When in
1986 Soviet press belabored Kohl for having, in a magazine interview, made a
comparison between the propaganda skills of Mikhail S. Gorbachev and Joseph
Goebbels, Schäuble was reported to have counseled the Chancellor against
writing Gorbachev an apology for the remark, saying it would be misunderstood
as a sign of weakness.[6]
In his capacity as Minister
for Special Affairs, Schäuble was put in charge of the preparations for the
first official state visit of Erich
Honecker, Chairman of the State Council
of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), in
1987. By that time, he was widely considered to be one of Kohl's closest
advisers.[7]
Federal Minister of the Interior, 1989–1991
In a cabinet reshuffle
Schäuble was made Minister of the Interior
on 21 April 1989. In this role he also led the negotiations on behalf of the Federal
Republic of Germany for reunification with the GDR
in 1990. And he and East German State Secretary Günther
Krause signed the Unification Treaty on 31 August 1990.[8][9] In a powerful and emotional speech to
parliament in 1991, Schäuble clinched the argument in favour of moving the
German capital from Bonn to Berlin.[10]
In the 1990s Schäuble was one
of the most popular politicians in Germany and there was constant speculation
that he would replace Kohl as Chancellor, whose popularity was declining.[11] In November 1991, Schäuble became the Christian
Democrats' parliamentary floor leader, replacing 71-year-old Alfred
Dregger, in a move that made him Kohl's likely heir-apparent.[12] In 1997 Helmut Kohl stated that Schäuble was
his desired candidate to succeed him, but he did not want to hand over power
until 2002 when the European monetary union would be completed with the
introduction of the euro.[citation needed] However, as the CDU/CSU lost the 1998 election,
Schäuble never became Chancellor.
After Eberhard
Diepgen was voted out as mayor of Berlin, Schäuble was in talks to be the
top candidate for the early election on 21 October 2001, but
was rejected by the Berlin branch of the CDU in favour of Frank
Steffel.
Some quarters of the CDU and
CSU wanted to put Schäuble forward as their candidate for the office of German
President, the largely ceremonial head of state, at the beginning of March
2004, due to his extensive political experience. In spite of support from the
Premiers of Bavaria
(Edmund
Stoiber (CSU)) and Hesse (Roland Koch (CDU)),[citation needed] Schäuble did not receive the party's nomination
in the end because CDU leader Angela Merkel, other CDU politicians and the
liberal FDP party spoke out against him.
This was because the election contributions scandal involving Schäuble that
first came to light in late 1999 had never been entirely resolved.[citation needed]
Federal Minister of the Interior, 2005–2009
Ahead of the 2005 elections, Angela
Merkel included Schäuble in her shadow
cabinet for the Christian Democrats’ campaign to unseat incumbent Gerhard Schröder as chancellor. During the
campaign, Schäuble served as Merkel's expert for security and foreign policy.[13]
Following the elections,
Schäuble was mentioned as potential candidate for the office of Federal Minister of Defense.[14] In the subsequent negotiations to form a coalition government, however, he led the
CDU/CSU delegation in the working group on interior policy; his co-chair from the
SPD was Brigitte
Zypries.[15] Once the new government was formed, Schäuble
once again became Minister of the Interior, this time in the Grand
Coalition under Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Between 2007 and 2009,
Schäuble was one of 32 members of the Second Commission on the modernization
of the federal state, which had been established to reform the division of
powers between federal and state authorities in Germany.
Federal Minister of Finance, 2009–present
Following the 2009 federal election, Schäuble, by
then one of Germany's most seasoned politicians,[16] became Minister of Finance in
October 2009. Then aged 67, he was the oldest man in the cabinet and the
longest-serving member of the parliament[17] in the history of the Federal Republic.[10] He was also one of seven conservative ministers
in Merkel's outgoing government who remained in power.[18] By 2014, the Wall Street Journal called Schäuble
"Germany's second most powerful person after Chancellor Angela
Merkel."[19]
During his time in office,
Schäuble has widely been regarded the most vocal advocate in the government of
European integration,[20] and a passionate proponent of co-operation with
France.[21] Along with Chancellor Angela Merkel, however,
he has often taken a hard line toward the countries that have caused the eurozone
crisis.[22] In 2012, Schäuble rejected calls from the
chairwoman of the International Monetary Fund, Christine
Lagarde, to give Greece more time to make additional spending cuts to rein
in deficits.[23] That same year, President Karolos
Papoulias of Greece accused Schäuble of insulting his nation.[24] In October 2013, Schäuble was accused by the
former Portuguese Prime Minister, José Sócrates, for regularly placing news in the
media against Portugal during the eurozone crisis prior to the Portuguese
bailout; Sócrates called him a "Sly Minister of Finance".[25]
A leading advocate of
austerity during the eurozone crisis[26]— Schäuble in 2014 pushed through a national
budget of 299 billion euros that allowed Germany to not take on any new debt
for the first time since 1969.[27] He has been described variously as the
"personification of fiscal discipline"[28] and "Europe's foremost ayatollah of
austerity"[29]—Schäuble's reputation for tough control of
spending has been helped by Germany's rapid recovery from recession but he has
repeatedly rebuffed calls from government supporters for vote-winning tax cuts.[30] Throughout his tenure, he stood by his position
that structural reforms such as overhauling labor markets in Europe are the way
out of a low-growth spiral.[31] In 2013, for example, Schäuble and Vítor
Gaspar, his counterpart in Portugal, announced a plan to use the German
state development bank KfW
to help set up a financial institution to assist Portuguese under age 25 in
getting jobs or job training.[32]
In 2012, following the
resignation of Jean-Claude Juncker as president of the 17 euro
zone finance ministers, known as the Eurogroup,
suggestions soon gathered pace that Chancellor Angela Merkel was pressing for
Schäuble to take up the position;[24][10] the job later went to Jeroen Dijsselbloem instead.
In the negotiations to form a
coalition government following the 2013 federal elections, he led the
CDU/CSU delegation in the financial policy working group; his co-chair from the
SPD was the Mayor of Hamburg, Olaf
Scholz.[33] Between 2014 and 2015, Schäuble and Scholz
again led the negotiations on overhauling the so-called solidarity surcharge on income and corporate
tax (Solidaritätszuschlag) and reorganizing financial relations between
Germany's federal government and the federal states.[34]
On Schäuble's initiative,
Germany became a founding member of the Asian Infrastructure Investment
Bank.[35]
Political views
European integration
Echoing earlier proposals made
by Prime Minister Édouard Balladur of France, Schäuble and fellow
lawmaker Karl Lamers in 1994 urged the European Union to adopt a policy they
called "variable geometry" under which the five
countries most committed to integration – Germany, France, Belgium, the
Netherlands and Luxemburg – would proceed swiftly toward monetary union, joint
foreign and defense policies and other forms of integration.[36] In 2014, both reiterated their ideas in an
op-ed for the Financial Times, renewing their call for a core
group of European Union countries to move ahead faster with economic and
political integration.[37] Countries such as Britain should put forward
proposals for returning some competences to national governments, they said,
while "the EU should focus mainly on the following areas: a fair and open
internal market; trade; currency and financial markets; climate, environment
and energy; and foreign and security policy."[38] Also, they proposed the establishment of a
European budget commissioner with powers to reject national budgets if they do
not correspond to the jointly-agreed rules and a "eurozone
parliament" comprising the MEPs of eurozone countries to strengthen the
democratic legitimacy of decisions affecting the single currency bloc.[39]
Schäuble is also of the view
that Europe's problem is not the European
Union, but rather certain national governments that cannot resist the
temptation to make the EU and Europe the scapegoat for their own national
problems. Examples pointed out by Schäuble include the EU's Stability and Growth Pact, and the
Ministry of Finance's view that the introduction of the euro would damage the
German economy. In 2015, Finance Minister Yanis
Varoufakis of Greece called Schäuble "the intellectual force behind
the project of European Monetary
Union."[40]
On 21 November 2011 Schäuble
said the euro would emerge stronger from the current crisis, thus leaving Great
Britain on the sidelines unless it signed up. He said Great Britain would be
forced to join the eurozone faster than some in the UK thought.[41] On a British exit from the EU, Schäuble argued
in 2014 that Britain's EU membership was particularly important for Germany as
both countries share a market-oriented reform approach in many economic and
regulatory questions.[42]
Foreign policy
Schäuble is considered a
"committed transatlanticist"[43] On 7 June 2011, he was among the guests invited
to the state
dinner hosted by President Barack
Obama in honor of Chancellor Angela Merkel at the White
House.[44]
In 2002, shortly before the Iraq War,
Schäuble accused German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of strengthening Saddam
Hussein by undermining the unanimity of international pressure on Iraq
to open up to United Nations weapons inspectors.[45] On Schröder's initiative to join forces with
President Jacques Chirac of France and President Vladimir
Putin of Russia in opposing the war, Schäuble commented: "This
triangular relationship involving Berlin, Paris and Moscow was a dangerous
development. It was very dangerous for the small countries in Europe because
they perceived it as an axis and you can understand why. We want good relations
with Russia but we do not want those relations to be misunderstood."[46] Schäuble, in contrast to many German
politicians, subsequently defended the United States' decision to invade Iraq.
By 2006, he said he thought the overthrow of Saddam
Hussein was in itself correct, but that he was "doubtful" from the
outset about the Iraq war because it resulted from a unilateral decision by the
US.[47]
Schäuble accused Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of lacking an appropriate
historical conscience, because he accepted alleged human rights violations by
the Russian Government without criticism. On 31 March 2014, Schäuble compared
the annexation of the Sudetenland by Nazi Germany in 1938 to the annexation of Crimea
by Russia in the 2014 Crimean crisis. Similar to Vladimir
Putin, Adolf Hitler had claimed that "ethnic
Germans" in peripheral regions of what was then Czechoslovakia required
protection.[48]
Domestic policy
In 1999 Schäuble initiated a
CDU/CSU petition campaign against the reform of German citizenship law under
the slogan "Integration: yes — double citizenship: no". In response
to anti-immigrant
rallies in the eastern city of Dresden in late 2014, Schäuble said that
immigration is good for Germany and politicians must explain better that
everyone stands to gain from it; at the time, the number of asylum seekers in
Germany, many from Syria,
had more than doubled within a year to around 200,000, and net immigration was
at its highest level in two decades. "Just as we used millions of refugees
and expellees after World War Two to rebuild.. so we need immigration
today," Schäuble told Bild when asked about the popularity of anti-immigration
policies.[49] Also, he held that "people are right to
fear Islamist terrorism. But not Islam."[50]
Schäuble was among the
high-ranking guests attending the re-opening of Rykestrasse Synagogue, Germany's largest
synagogue, in September 2007.[51] In May 2008, he banned two right-wing
organizations he described as "reservoirs of organized Holocaust
deniers."[52] In 2009, he also banned the Homeland-Faithful
German Youth, a far-right group, on grounds that it organizes seemingly
harmless, such as holiday activities, to promote racist and Nazi ideology among
children and young people.[53]
Schäuble is widely considered
as one of several prominent conservatives who are in favor of shifting the
CDU's restrictive stance on gay marriage.[54]
Homeland security
Schäuble has been calling for
more muscular policies to combat terrorism since he joined the first Merkel government in 2005.[55] Shortly after he assumed the position of
Minister of the Interior, the 2006 German train bombing plot
became the closest Germany is known to have come to a large-scale terrorist
attack since 11 September 2001, and Schäuble publicly stated the country
escaped that one only through luck.[56]
As a consequence of the
terrorism threats, Schäuble proposed several controversial measures. Ahead of
the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany, he repeatedly
advocated for amending the constitution to allow the military's use for
domestic security purposes.[57] Among the methods that he believed Germans
should at least debate are preventative detention of people suspected of
terrorist activities and assassinations of the leaders of terrorist
organizations.[58] In March 2007, Schäuble said in an interview
that the application of presumption of innocence should not be
relevant for the authorization of counter-terrorist
operations.[59]
Later that same year Schäuble
proposed the introduction of legislation that would allow the German Federal
Government to carry out targeted killing of terrorists, as well as outlaw
the use of the Internet and cell phones for people suspected of being terrorist
sympathizers.[60]
On 27 February 2008, he called
on all European newspapers to print the Muhammad cartoons
with the explanation: "We also think they're pathetic, but the use of
press freedom is no reason to resort to violence."[61]
In July 2009, Schäuble said in
an interview that Berlin would have to "clarify whether our constitutional
state is sufficient for confronting new threats."[62][63] He said that the legal problems his office had
to struggle with "extend all the way to extreme cases such as so-called targeted
killing ... Imagine someone knew what cave Osama bin Laden is sitting in. A
remote-controlled missile could then be fired in order to kill him."[62][63] The interviewer said: "Germany's federal
government would probably send a public prosecutor there first, to arrest bin
Laden."[62][63] Schäuble responded: "And the Americans
would execute him with a missile, and most people would say: 'thank God'."[62][63]
In the wake of the deadly attacks in Paris on the offices of
satirical publication Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket in January
2015, Schäuble and his French counterpart Michel
Sapin wrote a letter to the European Commission, calling for continent-wide
legislation to better trace financial flows and freeze the assets of terrorists
living in the European Union.[64]
Criticism
Criticism of Schäuble centers
on his law and order politics during his second
term as Federal Minister of the Interior, especially in the field of counter-terrorism,
for which he is denounced by some civil
rights activists. Vocal opponents include the open-source software community.[65] The latest decisions of his ministry have led
to a campaign dubbed Stasi 2.0 by its initiators, claiming intentional
resemblance to the East German Ministerium für Staatssicherheit.[66]
Controversy was sparked by
Schäuble's recommendation in a 2007 interview of a book by Otto
Depenheuer, who defended the Guantanamo Bay detention camp as a
"legally permissible response in the fight of constitutional civilisation
against the barbarity of terrorism".[67]
As a protest against his
support for the increasing use of biometric data,
the hacker group Chaos Computer Club published one of Schäuble's
fingerprints
in the March 2008 edition of its magazine Datenschleuder. The magazine
also included the print on a film that readers could use to fool fingerprint
readers.[68]
In November 2008, a bill
giving the Federal Criminal Police Office
(BKA) more authority failed when some states abstained from the vote in the Bundesrat, the legislative representative of
the states. Subsequently, Schäuble suggested changing Bundesrat's voting
procedures to discount abstention votes from the total. Many politicians of the
opposition criticized his proposal, and some called for his resignation.[69][70]
In February 2009, Schäuble's
homepage was hacked due to a security flaw in the TYPO3 CMS and its non-secure password gewinner
("winner"). The hack consisted of a defacement that placed a large,
easily visible link on his front page to the homepage of the German Working Group on Data
Retention.[71]