In his first time period, Mr. Simitis set about curbing Greece’s extravagant private and non-private spending and sought to organize the economic system to fulfill 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 provided a marked distinction with the Papandreou years.
“We wanted somebody who would say much less and do extra, an individual who’s an odd Greek, who doesn’t descend from on excessive, and who doesn’t cover issues with limitless myths,” Dimitris Rappas, a authorities spokesman, advised The New York Instances in 1996.
Mr. Simitis received a second time period in 2000, however solely by a wafer-thin majority and much wanting the endorsement he had sought in opposition to his principal challenger, Kostas Karamanlis, the chief of the New Democracy Occasion. It was on Mr. Simitis’s watch, too, that Greece lastly made its reckoning with the dreaded November 17 city terrorist motion that emerged from a preferred battle in opposition to the American-supported navy officers who took energy in 1967.
In 2002, an injured bomber started to speak and, because of this, the police made a slew of arrests that persuaded the authorities to say that a lot of the group had been rounded up. Theodore Couloumbis, a political analyst, stated 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 stated.
Two years later, although, Mr. Simitis resigned as PASOK chairman and stated 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 overseas minister.