As of: April 3, 2024, 5:30 p.m
By: Georg Anastasiadis
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Wolfgang Schäuble, then Federal Minister of Finance, in a photo from 2015. During this time, Edmund Stoiber (CSU) asked him to overthrow Chancellor Angela Merkel, as Schäuble posthumously reveals in his memoirs. A comment from Merkur editor-in-chief Georg Anastasiadis. © Odd Andersen/AFP/Klaus Haag
Wolfgang Schäuble posthumously reveals in his memoirs that Edmund Stoiber encouraged him to overthrow Chancellor Angela Merkel in view of the asylum crisis. If this had happened, it would have saved Germany from a lot of damage, comments Georg Anastasiadis.
It is not a state secret that Wolfgang Schäuble, the greatest of all CDU grandees, divulged posthumously in his memoirs: In 2015, at the height of the asylum crisis, the CSU honorary chairman Edmund Stoiber called on him to overthrow refugee chancellor Angela Merkel and close the government himself take over. At the time, it was a story enthusiastically fueled by the media - which was still very loyal to Merkel at the time - that Stoiber from Bavaria was leading the “Merkel must go” movement. The then Federal Finance Minister Schäuble always played a leading role in this script. The putsch failed, and Bavarian Prime Minister Horst Seehofer paid the price. He was the only high-ranking active Union politician who dared to follow Stoiber and actually rebel against Merkel's course in the Union - and in the end initiated his own decline.
Schäuble described the refugee flow in 2015 as an “avalanche”
Schäuble was no one like Seehofer: he always acted from behind cover. However, he also fired up the flames himself - for example, when he described the swelling flow of refugees as an "avalanche" in November 2015, which was already seen at the time as a barely veiled criticism of Merkel and a hidden signal for an uprising. The idea of inheriting Merkel himself prematurely was certainly not as “absurd” as Schäuble makes it out to be in his memoirs.
It would have been better if the CDU grandees, especially Schäuble, who were kowtowing to Merkel, had summoned the courage of some CSU people and pointed out to the Chancellor more forcefully the consequences of her asylum policy, as Police Chief Dieter Romann did at the time. Limiting uncontrolled migration would have protected Germany from some damage, such as the loss of trust in the Union's politics, the erosion of the center and the meteoric rise of right-wing populists from the AfD. Stoiber and Schäuble's heirs will have to bear this burden for a long time to come.
George Anastasiadis