Wolfgang Clement (7 July 1940 – 27 September 2020) was a German politician and a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD).

The labor and welfare reforms have been credited with reducing unemployment and contributing to Germany's growth years.

He completed his degree in law at the University of Münster in 1965, including clearing the First State Examination, a qualification that allowed him to teach.

[9] With state debts in excess of 130,000 million marks (DEM), he announced drastic cuts and austerity measures including reduction in the size of his own cabinet.

[11] On 9 February 1999, the Constitutional Court of North Rhine-Westphalia ruled that the amalgamation violated the rights of the state parliament.

An animation studio in Oberhausen received €50 million in funding as part of this program, but generated limited employment in the end.

[24] After the 2002 federal elections, Clement was part of the Social Democrats’ team in negotiations with the Green Party on a new coalition agreement for a government under the leadership of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder.

He gave up his office of Minister-President of NRW on 21 October 2002 and was appointed Federal Minister of Economics and Labour in the new government led by Schröder.

[26][4] The prevailing social democratic thinking in Europe was re-shaped by the Schröder-Blair paper of 1999, a joint working paper between German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, which introduced the "third way" or "Neue Mitte" in that a social democratic future required a comprehensive economization of society with the state withdrawing from the markets and other welfare measures.

[28][29] Agenda 2010 was announced as the single largest reform efforts in post-war Germany, and included a set of actions that sought to rethink how the government organized education, social security, and employment.

[26] However, the reforms led to a rift between the left and centrist sections of the SPD, driven by oppositions from the trade unions and social organizations, ultimately resulting in the split Germany's center-left, and led to the creation of the far-left party Die Linke and significantly weakened the SPD.

[38] In 2007, Clement was awarded the Mercator Visiting Professorship for Political Management at the Universität Essen-Duisburg's NRW School of Governance.

[39] In 2017, Federal Minister of Health Hermann Gröhe appointed Clement as Special Commissioner for Germany's candidacy to become the new headquarters of the European Medicines Agency (EMA).

[41] In addition, he was a member of multiple corporate boards and non-profit organizations (below): Wolfgang Clement married his wife, Karin, in 1966 and went on to have five daughters and thirteen granddaughters.