BERLIN (AFP) – Former West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who died Tuesday aged 96, was an inveterate European, master of realpolitik, and straight-talking elder statesman who commanded respect and headlines into his twilight years.Schmidt led then-West Germany from 1974 to 1982 as it rose to become a global economic powerhouse.A centrist from the Social Democratic Party (SPD), 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.Leading tributes to the man she …read more
Source: Dunya TV
