Wolfgang Schäuble

German lawyer and politician, a loyal Kohl partisan and deft party strategist, a workaholic. As Minister of the Interior, he steered the government through the worst racial violence since the Third Reich; summoned East European nations to discuss immigration; and regularly negotiated compromises between the ruling Christian Democrats and the Socialist opposition. He was the longest-serving member of any democratic German parliament. Schäuble served as 13th president of the Bundestag from 2017 to 2021.

On 12 October 1990, Schauble was shot in the face and back by a deranged gunman at 10:04 PM MET, during a political address at Oppenau. Left partially paralyzed, he might never have walked again but did, nonetheless, make remarkable strides in rehabilitation.

After the defeat of the CDU/CSU in the 1998 federal election, Schäuble succeeded his mentor Helmut Kohl as Chairman of the CDU, but resigned after less than two years in the aftermath of the 1999 party financing scandal. In 2005, Schäuble again became Minister of the Interior in the Cabinet of Chancellor Angela Merkel, and in 2009 Minister of Finance, a position he remained in for almost eight years.

Described in this capacity as "Germany's second most powerful person" after Merkel, he took a hard line towards Southern European countries during the eurozone crisis and rejected calls from the International Monetary Fund to give Greece more time to rein in deficits. A proponent of austerity policies, Schäuble's 2014 budget allowed Germany to take on no new debt for the first time since 1969. On 27 September 2017 the CDU/CSU group in the Bundestag announced Schäuble's nomination as President of the Bundestag. He was elected to that position on 24 October 2017. Following the defeat of the CDU/CSU in the 2021 German federal election, Schäuble lost the office by October 2021.

Wolfgang Schäuble had been married to economist, teacher and former Welthungerhilfe chairwoman Ingeborg Hensle since 1969.