In his first time period, Mr. Simitis set about curbing Greece’s extravagant private and non-private spending and sought to arrange the economic system to satisfy European Union targets for his nation’s entry into the eurozone. He had succeeded in lowering inflation and public indebtedness whereas stabilizing the drachma foreign money.
His cautious method supplied a marked distinction with the Papandreou years.
“We would have liked somebody who would say much less and do extra, an individual who’s an abnormal Greek, who doesn’t descend from on excessive, and who doesn’t disguise issues with countless myths,” Dimitris Rappas, a authorities spokesman, instructed The New York Occasions in 1996.
Mr. Simitis gained a second time period in 2000, however solely by a wafer-thin majority and much in need of the endorsement he had sought towards his essential challenger, Kostas Karamanlis, the chief of the New Democracy Social gathering. It was on Mr. Simitis’s watch, too, that Greece lastly made its reckoning with the scary November 17 city terrorist motion that emerged from a well-liked battle towards the American-supported army officers who took energy in 1967.
In 2002, an injured bomber started to speak and, in consequence, the police made a slew of arrests that persuaded the authorities to say that many of the group had been rounded up. Theodore Couloumbis, a political analyst, mentioned on the time that the nation had undergone a “sea change.”
“We’ve crossed the brink from an unstable democracy to a consolidated one,” he mentioned.
Two years later, although, Mr. Simitis resigned as PASOK chairman and mentioned he wouldn’t contest the forthcoming election, wherein his celebration misplaced to New Democracy. He was succeeded as head of PASOK by George Papandreou, a son of Andreas Papandreou who, on the time, was Greece’s international minister.
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