Greek reformist ex-PM Simitis dies at 88

ATHENS, JAN 5 (AFP/APP): Costas Simitis, the reformist prime minister whose governments oversaw Greece’s eurozone entry, helped Cyprus join the EU and planned for the Athens 2004 Olympics, died Sunday at the age of 88.

                  The Greek government announced on Sunday a four-day national mourning. 

                  Current Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, in a statement, expressed his sadness at the passing of Costas Simitis and his respect for “a worthy and noble political opponent who accompanied Greece on its great national steps: the accession to the Eurozone and the Euro and the entry of Cyprus into Europe”.

                  Mitsotakis said Simitis was “a personality who, undoubtedly, leaves his own imprint on the development of the country, throughout the last decades.”

                  Mitsotakis concluded his tribute by saying Simitis’s legacy “still runs through the demands of our country today. Something that marks Kostas Simitis’ contribution to it. Allowing him, from now on, to maintain a special place in memory and history. My most sincere condolences to his wife Daphne, his daughters and his family.”

                  Simitis studied law in Germany and was a resistance fighter during Greece’s seven-year dictatorship, fleeing the country in 1969 to avoid arrest.

                  The former law professor was a founding member of the PASOK party formed in 1974 by socialist firebrand Andreas Papandreou, and a key cadre in the party’s three terms in government after 1981.

                  As minister for economy and later industry, the austerity-minded Simitis repeatedly clashed with Papandreou’s freewheeling policies.

                  But when Papandreou lay near death in 1996, he was picked internally by the party to replace him as prime minister.

                  Tensions with neighbouring Turkey spiked dangerously on two occasions under Simitis’s administration.

                  In 1996, the historic rivals and NATO allies nearly went to war over a cluster of uninhabited islets in the Aegean Sea.

                  A naval showdown in the area was ultimately averted after the United States intervened.

                  In early 1999, Greece was left red-faced when separatist Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan was revealed to have been hiding at the Greek embassy in Kenya, and was snatched by Turkish commandos.

                  Three of Simitis’s ministers were forced to resign over the diplomatic debacle.

                  A few months later, both countries were hit by deadly earthquakes and rushed to each other’s aid.

                  Simitis used the opportunity to usher in a period of detente with Turkey under his foreign minister George Papandreou, which later became known as “quake diplomacy”.

                  Simitis narrowly won re-election in 2000 in a campaign tarnished by claims that his government had illegally naturalised thousands of ethnic Greek voters from the former Soviet Union.

                  In 2001, Greece joined the euro. In 2003, it held the European Union presidency that saw the bloc’s largest enlargement to date, with the accession of ten new EU states including historic ally Cyprus.

                  Simitis’s second administration had its hands full preparing the Athens 2004 Olympic Games, which were dogged by serious construction delays to the finish.

                  But the Olympics were ultimately staged by a different government, led by the rival conservative New Democracy party. Simitis had already resigned as party leader before the 2004 elections as defeat loomed.

                  In later years, the legacy of Simitis’s governments was dimmed by probes into a major stock bubble and corruption scandals that saw two of his former ministers jailed.

                  After Greece’s debt rating collapsed in 2010 and it was nearly kicked out of the eurozone, questions were also raised in many European capitals whether Athens had cooked the books a decade earlier to join the single currency.

                  Simitis strongly defended his track record in a 2012 book on the Greek debt crisis, insisting that Athens had waged a “titanic” effort to meet eurozone entry requirements.

                  “The entry decision… was taken after an exhaustive evaluation by the European Commission, the European Central Bank and (the European Council’s) economic and financial committee,” he said.

                  “Whichever way fiscal performance is measured, (Greece’s) state deficit fell by ten points to 2.5 percent in 1999,” the fiscal year on which Greece based its entry, he said.