April 30 (Reuters) – German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s old
Volkswagen wasn’t worth the 130,000 euros ($172,100) bogus
online bidders kited it to earlier this month, but the first
woman chancellor’s 1990 Golf finally went to the highest bidder
on Monday for 10,165 euros.
Successful bidder Dirk Fricke, who bought the car for his
company Frisch-Licht, told Reuters he was happy with what he saw
as a low price tag, though he wasn’t a fan of Merkel’s.
“We’re politically totally neutral,” he said by telephone.
“It was just about keeping the car in Germany. A car like this
can’t be lost to Germany, like the Pope’s car years ago.”
In a similar auction in 2005, a U.S. bidder paid nearly
$250,000 for a 21-year-old gray 1990 Volkswagen Golf that once
belonged to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who later became Pope
Benedict.
A previous attempt to sell Merkel’s car earlier this month
failed after online auction platform eBay noticed the offers
came from fake bidders, prompting a second auction, in which
bidders had to pre-register and identify themselves.
The seller, an anonymous Berlin resident, had advertised the
vehicle on eBay with 190,000 km (118,000 miles) on the clock as
“Angela’s Merkel first Western car: unique collector’s item”.
The posting included a copy of the registration papers and
photographs of it parked in front of the chancellor’s office.
Merkel bought the Golf, a white 1990 model worth a few
hundred euros today, about a month before German reunification
on Oct. 3, 1990.
At the time, she had just shifted from the East German
opposition political movement Democratic Awakening to the
eastern faction of the Christian Democrats.
She drove her Golf until entering Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s
cabinet as a minister in 1994. It was eventually sold in 1996.
Nowadays Merkel rides around in an armoured Audi but media
reports say her husband still drives a Volkswagen, which
literally translated means “people’s car”.
