Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite and its Prime Minister Algirdas Butkevicius, have sent condolences to Germany over the passing of former chancellor Helmut Schmidt.
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He became chancellor at a time of crisis for West Germany, replacing Willy Brandt, who had been forced to resign when his close assistant Guenter Guillaume was uncovered as a Stasi agency spying for the East German intelligence agency.
“He once said there will be three major worldwide currencies in the world, the dollar, the euro and the RMB”, Ma recalled.
Current German Chancellor Angela Merkel hailed Schmidt as a mastermind of worldwide co-operation whose decisions continue to have an effect today.
He was a popular guest on television chat shows, always granted special dispensation to flout a smoking ban while holding forth with the laconic brand of wit prized in his native port city of Hamburg.
“Helmut Schmidt was a committed and wise political leader and statesman who had served his country and its people for many years with great dedication”, said Grybauskaite in her message. Schmidt steered the country through a bloody wave of terror by far-left radicals from the Red Army Faction (RAF), preached free-market economics to his party and embodied cool-headed pragmatic politics in a Europe riven by the Iron Curtain.
European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said of Schmidt that he had lost a friend with political courage.
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He said that Schmidt, together with former French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing, had founded a European currency system and so paved the way for the euro. That wasn’t true for the “little haberdasher” who built an American-led global order from scratch in the 1940s. But the experience convinced him of the importance of European integration to guarantee peace on the continent and of a sturdy alliance with the United States to face the Cold War threat from Moscow. They had been married for 68 years.
