Wolfgang Schauble, historic German Finance Minister and former president of the Bundestag, has died. He was 81 years old.
The CDU politician, considered one of the most authoritative men of the last decades of politics in Germany, passed away yesterday evening "peacefully among his family", the Dpa agency and the main German media report.
Remembered as an "austerity hawk", Schauble influenced the main economic choices of the European Union in the 2000s.
He obtained his first seat in the Bundestag in 1972, and remained there for life. Under Chancellor Helmut Kohl he was a minister: in 1990 he escaped an attack but remained in a wheelchair. In the 2000s Merkel appointed him Minister of the Interior and then of Finance, a position he held for two terms.
(Unioneonline/L)
