Jacques Santer
Jacques Santer was prime minister of Luxembourg from 1984 to 1995 and president of the European Commission from 1995 to 1999, the Christian Social lawyer who inherited the government from Werner and governed the years in which the financial centre passed the steel industry as the country's economy and the population passed four hundred thousand, a third of them foreign. There was the Luxembourg presidency of the Community in 1985 that made the Single European Act, the second in 1991 that drafted the Maastricht treaty, whose text on monetary union was largely Luxembourg's work. There was the Schengen agreement of 1985 signed on a boat on the Moselle at the village of that name, in the Grand Duchy, by the five countries that abolished their borders. He was chosen for the Commission in 1994 when Britain vetoed Dehaene as too federalist. Kohl and Major could agree on the man from the smallest member. He was confirmed by the European Parliament by a margin of twenty-two votes. The Commission's four years were the euro made ready, with the eleven members chosen in May 1998 and the currency born on 1 January 1999. There were the Amsterdam treaty and the Agenda 2000 for the eastern enlargement. There was the fraud and nepotism scandal in which the Commissioner Cresson had employed her dentist as a scientific adviser and the Parliament's committee of wise men reported in March 1999 that it was difficult to find anyone who had the slightest sense of responsibility. The whole Commission resigned on 15 March, the only time it has, three months before the euro's first summer. He was born in Wasserbillig in 1937, studied law in Strasbourg and Paris, was the Christian Social Party's secretary-general and president, sat in the European Parliament in 1975-79. He was Werner's finance minister and labour minister from 1979, the man who managed the steel tripartite. He sat in the European Parliament again from 1999 to 2004, chaired the Klaus Schwab foundation's European board and the Luxembourg state's investment fund. He was the country's elder at the celebrations of Schengen's thirtieth year and the euro's twentieth. The Commission he lost is remembered for Cresson, and the currency he readied is used by three hundred and fifty million people, which he has said is the arithmetic that matters.
- Lived: 1937 CE – ?
- Nationality: Luxembourgish
- Roles: prime minister, politician
