{"id":208356,"date":"2025-01-05T17:55:09","date_gmt":"2025-01-05T17:55:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2025\/01\/05\/costas-simitis-2-time-prime-minister-of-greece-dies-at-88\/"},"modified":"2025-01-05T17:55:10","modified_gmt":"2025-01-05T17:55:10","slug":"costas-simitis-2-time-prime-minister-of-greece-dies-at-88","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2025\/01\/05\/costas-simitis-2-time-prime-minister-of-greece-dies-at-88\/","title":{"rendered":"Costas Simitis, 2-Time Prime Minister of Greece, Dies at 88"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Costas<\/div>


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In his first term, Mr. Simitis set about curtailing Greece\u2019s extravagant public and private spending and sought to prepare the economy to meet European Union targets for his country\u2019s entry into the eurozone. He had succeeded in reducing inflation and public indebtedness while stabilizing the drachma currency.<\/p>\n

His cautious manner offered a marked contrast with the Papandreou years.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe needed someone who would say less and do more, a person who is an ordinary Greek, who doesn\u2019t descend from on high, and who doesn\u2019t hide problems with endless myths,\u201d Dimitris Rappas, a government spokesman, told The New York Times in 1996.<\/p>\n

Mr. Simitis won a second term in 2000, but only by a wafer-thin majority and far short of the endorsement he had sought against his main challenger, Kostas Karamanlis, the leader of the New Democracy Party. It was on Mr. Simitis\u2019s watch, too, that Greece finally made its reckoning with the feared November 17 urban terrorist movement that emerged from a popular struggle against the American-supported military officers who took power in 1967.<\/p>\n

In 2002, an injured bomber began to talk and, as a result, the police made a slew of arrests that persuaded the authorities to say that most of the organization had been rounded up. Theodore Couloumbis, a political analyst, said at the time that the country had undergone a \u201csea change.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve crossed the threshold from an unstable democracy to a consolidated one,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Two years later, though, Mr. Simitis resigned as PASOK chairman and said he would not contest the forthcoming election, in which his party lost to New Democracy. He was succeeded as head of PASOK by George Papandreou, a son of Andreas Papandreou who, at the time, was Greece\u2019s foreign minister.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In his first term, Mr. Simitis set about curtailing Greece\u2019s extravagant public and private spending and sought to prepare the economy to meet European Union targets for his country\u2019s entry into the eurozone. He had succeeded in reducing inflation and public indebtedness while stabilizing the drachma currency. His cautious manner offered a marked contrast with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":208357,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2025\/01\/05\/world\/00simitis\/00simitis-facebookJumbo.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[164395,164391,163460,16,164392,164393,896,14314,19361,2124,164394,137131,8088,164390],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208356"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=208356"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208356\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":208358,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208356\/revisions\/208358"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/208357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=208356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=208356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=208356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}