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The former German economy minister died on Sunday at the age of 80. As one of the architects of Agenda 2010, he helped create the conditions for an economic rebound, but fell out with his party.
A reformer who paid little attention to doubters: Wolfgang Clement was a politician who polarized his fellow party members.
There are not many Social Democrats like him in Germany anymore: Wolfgang Clement was what is commonly called “close to business.” The fact that the Federal Republic is in a relatively good economic position is mainly due to his politics as minister, but Clement’s relationship with his party was so shattered in the end that he left it.
He was born during the war in 1940 in the city of Bochum, in the Ruhr area, as the son of a bricklayer who later worked his way up to become a master builder. After graduating from high school, Wolfgang Clement studied law in Münster and at the same time did an internship at the “Westfälische Rundschau” in Dortmund. In 1968 he became political editor of the newspaper, five years later deputy chief editor.
Between politics and journalism
Clement joined the SPD in 1970 at the age of 30. In 1981 he became a spokesman for the SPD federal executive committee, a position he left in 1986 to become editor-in-chief of the “Hamburger Morgenpost”, a tabloid close to the SPD, which at that time was still pursuing a certain intellectual pretense. In 1989, the then Prime Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, Johannes Rau, returned him to politics and appointed him head of his State Chancellery and later Minister of the Economy.
He and Clement worked at their desks until 11 p.m., then went to Düsseldorf’s old town for a drink or two of Altbier and then disappeared into the guest rooms at the prime minister’s house, the then-office manager later recalled. de Raus, Peer Steinbrück. But as he went to bed, Clement kept working late into the night. The next day he got up at seven to go jogging on the Rhine.
Following Rau’s resignation in May 1998, Clement became head of government in the most populous German state. From the beginning of his tenure, he made a name for himself as a reformer who showed little regard for those who were concerned. Critics saw a threat to the separation of powers in the merger of the justice and interior ministries, but Clement did not want to be deterred by a ruling by the North Rhine-Westphalia constitutional court. Only after the green coalition partner began to offer resistance was the merger reversed. The antagonism between Clement and Green Environment Minister Bärbel Höhn should prove formative for his time as Prime Minister. Above all, the future of coal mining divided the two politicians.
In 2008 he advised against voting for the SPD
After the 2002 federal elections, Clement moved to Berlin at the request of Federal Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and became “Super Minister” for the Economy and Labor. In addition to the then Chancellor of the Exchequer Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Schröder said in July that he celebrated Clement’s 80th birthday, he was one of the most important actors who designed the reforms of Agenda 2010. For the social democrats and left trade unionists, he became a The enemy, especially since he repeatedly complained of abuse while receiving unemployment benefits. In 2005, when Schröder was replaced by Angela Merkel, Clement also resigned from his post.
The relationship between him and his party was now deteriorating. In 2008, before a state election in Hesse, he advised against voting for the SPD, because its main candidate had spoken in favor of the closure of nuclear power plants and against the construction of new coal-fired power plants. Clement considered this irresponsible; his opponents accused him of taking sides with the energy company RWE, of which he had been a member of the supervisory board of its subsidiary since 2006.
“There were good times”
The process of expulsion from the party that was initiated against him, Clement defended himself until the last instance: on November 25, 2008, a day after the highest arbitration tribunal of the SPD decided to leave him in a reprimand against him, Clement resigned of the party. The SPD’s economic policy amounts to deindustrializing Germany, he complained. In election campaigns, Clement was now involved in the FDP, most recently in 2017 alongside his party leader Christian Lindner.
In the summer it was learned that Clement had lung cancer. “There were good times,” he summed up his life on his last birthday in July. Wolfgang Clement died on Sunday at the age of 80 in Bonn.
Together they implemented Agenda 2010: On July 7, 2004, Gerhard Schröder congratulated Wolfgang Clement on his 64th birthday.
