Costas Simitis

Papandreou, however, remained Chairman of the party for the next months until his death on 23 June (also Simitis' 60th birthday), just before a party conference would select the party's vice-president; after Papandreou's death, the conference would elect the new Party President.

Simitis was elected in PASOK's Fourth Congress on 30 June, defeating Akis Tsochatzopoulos on a platform of support for the European Union.

Constantine G. Simitis (Κωνσταντίνος Γ. Σημίτης; born 23 June 1936) is a Greek retired politician who led the 'Modernization' movement of Greece.

He is married to Daphne Arkadiou (b. 1938) and has two daughters, Fiona and Marilena.

He currently resides in the Kolonaki district of Athens.

His brother Spiros Simitis was a prominent jurist specializing in data privacy in Germany.

In 1965, he returned to Greece and was one of the founders of the "Alexandros Papanastasiou" political research group.

In 1967, after the military coup on 21 April, this group was transformed into Democratic Defense, an organization opposed to the military regime.

Simitis escaped abroad after planting bombs in the streets of Athens (in later years, he acknowledged his activities on the Greek MEGA TV channel) in order to avoid being jailed and became a member of the Panhellenic Liberation Movement (PAK), led by Andreas Papandreou.

He also took up a position as a university lecturer in Germany.

He returned to Athens in 1974 and was one of the co-founders of PAK's successor, the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK).

In 1977, he took up a lecturer's post at the Panteion University.

Simitis was not a candidate for the Greek Parliament in the 1981 elections, but he was appointed Minister of Agriculture in the first PASOK government of that year.

Following the 1985 elections and his election as a deputy to the Parliament, he became Minister of National Economy; he undertook an unpopular stabilization program, trying to curb inflation and reduce deficits, but resigned his post in 1987 because he felt that his policies were being undermined.

In 1993, he took over the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, but in 1995, he again resigned from the ministry and the party's Executive Bureau following a public rebuke he received from Prime Minister Papandreou.

He succeeded in leadership Andreas Papandreou, the founder of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK), and served as Prime Minister of Greece from 1996 to 2004.

The leadership transition from Papandreou to Simitis was neither orderly nor `friendly.' Simitis faced loyalists of the former Prime Minister who had spent much of their energy trying to prevent such a transition from ever taking place.

From the outset, the less-than-dominant position Simitis held in his party circumscribed so many of his actions.

On 16 January 1996, Papandreou resigned as Prime Minister due to ill health.

In a special election held by the party's parliamentary group on 18 January, Simitis was elected in his place over the candidacies of Akis Tsochatzopoulos, Gerasimos Arsenis and Ioannis Charalampopoulos.

Simitis then led the party in the national elections of 22 September 1996, gaining a mandate in his own right.

He also narrowly won the national election of 2000.

He worked very closely and had a good relationship with his Cabinet Secretary of 8 years, Sokratis Kosmidis.

Although he is widely respected throughout Europe, in Greece, Simitis was regarded by some Greeks as a rather dull technocrat, lacking the charisma of Papandreou.

By the time he had left office in 2004, however, Simitis had a number of significant achievements and reforms in the wider society and economy to proclaim: Greek entry into the Euro currency; the Cypriot accession into the EU; the successful completion of the Athens 2004 Summer Olympics; and the accomplishment of a variety of large-scale infrastructure projects (like the new Eleftherios Venizelos airport, the Athens ring road, Athens Metro, and Rio–Antirrio Bridge).

New institutions were also introduced, such as the Greek Ombudsman and a number of regulatory bodies to supervise market liberalization.

Under Simitis' governments, the Greek economy, after two decades of the exuberant rhetoric of his predecessors and financial stagnation, was put in order by reducing inflation from an annual average of 15% to 3%, and budget deficits from more than 10% to 3%.

The economy grew with an average annual increase of 4.1% of GDP.

On 7 January 2004, with PASOK's popularity collapsing, Simitis announced that he would resign as party president and would not stand for re-election as Prime Minister in the forthcoming legislative elections.

At the time, he was accused of bowing out to avoid humiliation at the polls.

However, by the end of his tenure on 10 March, he would be in office for over eight consecutive years, the longest continuous term in modern Greek history.

In a past interview, Simitis had already stated that he would remain prime minister for only two legislative periods since "he wanted to do other things in his life as well."

On 8 January, he called elections for the party president to be held on 8 February.

Simitis was succeeded as PASOK leader by the then-Minister of Foreign Affairs George Papandreou, the only candidate in these elections.

Despite Papandreou's personal popularity, PASOK lost the 7 March elections to the conservative New Democracy party, whose leader Kostas Karamanlis succeeded Simitis in the office of Prime Minister.

After the 2004 electoral defeat, Simitis remained a Member of the Hellenic Parliament for Piraeus, sitting on the Standing Committee on National Defence and Foreign Affairs.

Much later, after the debt crisis erupted in Greece in 2009, the legacy would be re-interpreted by critics as not being enough or misleading.

Yet, under Simitis, Greece had seemingly strengthened its capacity for reform and had, indeed, appeared both more 'modern' and 'European.'

Costas Simitis was born in Piraeus to Georgios Simitis, a Professor at the School of Economic and Commercial Sciences, and to his wife Fani (née Christopoulou).

He studied law at the University of Marburg in Germany and economics at the London School of Economics.