Germany 🇩🇪 Finance Minister 💰 'to quit'

Wolfgang Schaeuble, the eurozone's staunchest advocate of austerity policies, is set to leave his post as Germany's finance minister, according to officials in Europe's biggest economy.

The news on Wednesday came three day after Chancellor Angela Merkel won a fourth term in a federal election, but her conservative CDU/CSU alliance plunged from 42 percent support in 2013 to 33 percent on Sunday - their worst showing since 1949.

Aristides Hatzis, associate professor of law and economics at the University of Athens, said that Schaeuble's "demonisation" in Greece and elsewhere as the "architect and warden of austerity policies" in the wake of Europe's sovereign debt crisis was an "exaggeration".

Although Schaeuble occasionally broke protocol by publicly differing with Merkel during crises such as the eurozone debt turmoil and 2015's record refugee influx, he was instrumental in handing Germany's first balanced budget in four decades in 2014.

Describing himself as "pitiless" in his management of Germany's public purse, he showed the same exactitude towards his euro partners, campaigning for austerity and insisting on stringent conditions for any bailout contribution by Berlin.

UCJ, UNILORIN.