BERLIN HAS dismissed as “speculation” a report that Germany’s ailing finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, may resign in the coming weeks unless his health improves.
Stern magazine says the 68-year-old checked himself into hospital earlier this week, vowing to leave a healthy man in a month’s time – or resign. His extended hospital stay is to allow doctors treat operation wounds that have refused to heal properly and have required repeated medical attention in recent months.
Before entering hospital, Mr Schäuble reportedly offered his resignation, but chancellor Angela Merkel convinced him to hold off until after the hospital stay.
“If I see in four weeks that it’s just not possible any more, then I will take the consequences and no one can hold me back,” Mr Schäuble told close advisers, according to Stern.
“They’re not going to have to carry me out of office. In light of the frequency of my absences, it’s clear it’s reaching a limit.”
The minister has spent eight weeks in hospital so far this year, joking with visiting journalists that it was the only place from where his cabinet colleagues couldn’t pick his ministerial pockets.
But his illness prevented him from attending EU negotiations on the €750 billion euro-zone rescue fund earlier this year. He will be absent, too, from G20 finance minister talks in South Korea later this month.
The minister’s spokesman contradicted the magazine claims yesterday, saying: “He neither offered his resignation nor set a deadline.”
Berlin has confirmed Mr Schäuble’s extended hospital stay, saying the minister was working from his hospital bed, but declined to comment on other details of the Stern story.
According to German reports, the wound that refuses to heal was left by an operation earlier this year to install a small device in his lower intestine.
The wheelchair-using Mr Schäuble’s physical condition has always been a sensitive issue in public discussion, though the politician himself refuses to tip-toe the issue, asking once in an interview: “Can a cripple become chancellor? The question has to be asked.”
But this is a particularly sensitive time, almost exactly 20 years since a mentally ill man shot Mr Schäuble during an election campaign appearance, damaging his spine and leaving him paralysed.
Despite claims to the contrary, the ill-health of the finance minister has occupied senior minds in Berlin for months. Now a new finance minister is seen as increasingly likely, with interior minister Thomas de Maizière the front-runner.
Meanwhile former foreign minister Frank Walter Steinmeier and his wife Elke have been released from hospital for treatment at home after Mr Steinmeier donated a kidney at the end of August.
Doctors described as “very satisfactory” the recovery of Mr Steinmeier, parliamentary speaker for the opposition Social Democrats (SPD).