Charlemagne Prize to German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble

Dec 10, 2011, 13:33 GMT

Aachen, Germany - The Charlemagne Prize, Germany's most prestigious political award, has been won by Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, an architect of efforts to save the euro, the prize judges announced Saturday.

The annual prize ceremony every May in Aachen, near the Dutch and Belgian border, is usually attended by several national leaders.

Schaeuble was honoured for his work to stabilize the euro currency union and the process of European unification, the judges said just a day after an EU summit where Britain refused to join a deal with other European Union members to impose central checks over eurozone national budgets.

The Charlemagne committee said Schaeuble had been a main player in practically every major step to integration in the past 30 years.

Schaeuble, who uses a wheelchair after a 1990 assassination attempt left him partly paralysed, has been the main proponent of a new system approved this week to discipline overspending sovereign lenders.

The winner last May was Jean-Claude Trichet, who has since retired from the presidency of the European Central Bank.

The prize, named after Charlemagne (748-814), a Germanic king who conquered Italy and was the first person to unite Europe from the Mediterranean to the Baltic Sea under one power, was set up in 1950.