Costas Simitis, the former Prime Minister of Greece, passed away on Sunday at the age of 81. He served as Prime Minister from 1996 to 2004 and is credited with leading Greece to join the Eurozone.
Simitis was taken to a hospital in the city of Corinth early on Sunday morning from his holiday home west of Athens, unconscious and without a pulse, the hospital’s director was quoted as saying by the Greek media. An autopsy will be performed to determine the cause of death.Warm tributes appeared from across Greece ’s main political parties. “I bid farewell to Costas Simitis with sadness and respect.
A worthy and noble political opponent,” the prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, said in a Facebook post, also saluting a “good professor and moderate parliamentarian”. Another conservative politician, the former European commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos, recalled how he, as mayor of Athens, had cooperated “seamlessly and warmly” with Simitis in organising the Olympic Games. “He served the country with devotion and a sense of duty. … He was steadfast in facing difficult challenges and promoted policies that changed the lives of (many) citizens,” Avramopoulos added. Simitis, a co-founder of the Socialist Pasok party in 1974, eventually became the successor to the party’s founding leader, Andreas Papandreou, with whom he had an often contentious relationship. Simitis was a low-key pragmatist where Papandreou was a charismatic, fiery populist. He was also a committed pro-European, while Papandreou banked on strong opposition to Greece joining what was then the European Economic Community in the 1970s, before changing tack once he became prime minister. Simitis, a law professor and reformist, assumed leadership of Pasok in 1996 and was prime minister until 2004. During his government, Simitis reduced the budget deficit and public debt to make Athens qualify for eurozone membership. George Papandreou, the son of Andreas, succeeded Simitis as party leader and in 2008 expelled him from the Pasok parliamentary group after the two men clashed over policies, including Papandreou’s proposal to hold a referendum on the EU’s treaty of Lisbo
Costas Simitis Greece Former Prime Minister Politics Death
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