Statement by Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker on the passing away of Hans Tietmeyer

The news of Hans Tietmeyer's passing away has deeply saddened me. Europe, the Euro and I personally lose an important companion.

Hans Tietmeyer was one of the most important architects of the euro and thus of our European coexistence. Already as the representative of the German Ministry of Economics in the Werner Group, which drew up the first roadmap for the Economic and Monetary Union in 1970, Tietmeyer played a key role in the preparatory work for the common European currency.

Personally, I met and started appreciating Tietmeyer in the 1990s when as German Finance Secretary of State he helped successfully to lead the European Exchange Rate Mechanism out of turbulences and negotiated the stability criteria for the Euro. As top official and later as President of the Bundesbank, he always understood that German and European interests must be the two sides of the same coin. Thus, as President of the Bundesbank, Tietmeyer, who was among the first members of the ECB Governing Council, was strongly advocating the view that the national central bank officials did not act as representatives of their country in the ECB but as members of the Council with a personal responsibility towards the whole Euro area. At the beginning of the first meeting of the Governing Council on 9 June 1998, Tietmeyer therefore requested a change in the seating arrangement. Since then, the seating arrangement has no longer been determined according to the alphabetical order of the countries of origin of the Presidents of central banks, but by the alphabetical order of personal names.

According to Tietmeyer's conviction, independent and European monetary policy-makers as opposed to national representatives should shape the destiny of the common currency. He was an example of this conviction, setting the benchmark for the stability of the Euro. "One cannot and should not say that the truth is present in one country but not in another," goes a fitting description of his basic take on European negotiations.

He has made a remarkable contribution for Germany, for Europe and for many people - also because he always founded his work firmly on the principle of the social market economy. We will miss him: as a convinced European, as a politician standing for effective stability and as a human being.

My thoughts are with his family, his relatives and his friends.

STATEMENT/16/4521