Kostas Simitis
Kostas Simitis was prime minister of Greece from 1996 to 2004, the law professor whom the socialist party's deputies chose over Andreas Papandreou's family and courtiers when Papandreou lay dying, the moderniser who was everything Papandreou had not been, quiet, dull, German-trained and pro-European. In eight years he took Greece into the euro, in January 2001, by cutting the deficit from ten per cent of output to under three with figures that Eurostat revised after he had gone. He built the Athens airport, the metro, the Rio-Antirrio bridge and the Attiki motorway. He won the Olympic Games of 2004 and the arrest of the November 17 terrorist group that had killed twenty-three people in twenty-seven years. He improved relations with Turkey after the earthquakes of 1999 in which each country sent rescuers to the other. The Imia crisis of January 1996, in his first week, when Greek and Turkish commandos landed on two uninhabited rocks and the Americans talked them off, was the measure of what he inherited. He was born in Piraeus in 1936, the son of a lawyer of the wartime resistance, studied law at Marburg and economics at the London School of Economics, taught at Giessen and Konstanz, was in the resistance to the colonels' junta and escaped arrest in 1969 to Germany, and was a founder of PASOK in 1974. He held agriculture, the economy, education and industry under Papandreou, who dismissed him in 1987 for saying the deficit was real. He led the party's reformers against him from the backbenches. He won the elections of 1996 and 2000, the second by a single point. He lost the party's leadership to George Papandreou in January 2004 before the election that Karamanlis won. The structural reforms, of the pensions and the labour market, that he attempted in 2001 were withdrawn after a general strike, and the debt he left, at a hundred per cent of output under the revised figures, was the debt that 2010 found. The stock-market bubble of 1999 that the party's people had promoted and the submarine contracts were the scandals. He left parliament in 2009 and died in Athens in January 2025. The country gave him a state funeral and the argument over the euro years began again.
- Lived: 1936 CE – 2025 CE
- Nationality: Greek
- Roles: prime minister, politician
