Wolfgang Schäuble, the eurozone’s most powerful advocate of fiscal rectitude, is to step down as Germany’s finance minister, in what amounts to a momentous changing-of-the-guard in European financial policymaking.
Mr Schäuble, who will now become speaker of the Bundestag, was reviled by countries like Greece as an architect of austerity. But he was also seen as the most passionately pro-European minister in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government, a man deeply committed to closer EU integration.
News of his move came just three days after elections in which Ms Merkel’s conservative CDU/CSU bloc suffered their worst result since 1949 and the rightwing, anti-immigration Alternative for Germany won seats in the Bundestag for the first time.