Costas Simitis, the former socialist prime minister of Greece who was the architect of the country’s entry into the euro, has died aged 88.
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.
The government decreed a four-day period of official mourning. Simitis will receive a state funeral.
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 Lisbon. Simitis left parliament in 2009, warning that financial mismanagement would bring the country under the tutelage of the International Monetary Fund.
After Greece’s debt rating collapsed in 2010 – and the EU and IMF imposed harsh economic measures – his critics on the right and left did their best to denigrate his legacy.
Simitis strongly defended his record, publishing in 2012 a book criticising the handling of the crisis by Greek politicians and the EU. In that book, called Derailment, he also accused the European Commission of turning a blind eye to overspending by his conservative successor.
Simitis was born on 23 June 1936, the younger son of two politically active parents. His lawyer father, Georgios, was a member of the left-leaning resistance “government” during the German occupation and his mother, Fani, was an active feminist.
Simitis is survived by his wife of 60 years, Daphne, two daughters and a granddaughter.
