If journalism is the first draft of history, then the overall assessment of the legacy of late PM Costas Simitis (he died on 5 January at age 88) is resoundingly positive, though the significant flaws and errors in his eight-year term in office (1996-2004) have also been acknowledged.
The balance will surely be much-discussed in the future writing and re-writing of history.
An ardent Europeanist throughout his life – with strong left-wing credentials in his early years – including notable anti-junta activity -Simitis firmly believed that Greece’s future and fate – economic and political – is intricately tied to having a solid grounding at the core of the European Union.
He was one of the founding members of Andreas Papandreou’s socialist PASOK party. When it issued its founding declaration on 3 September, 1974. Simitis was seated in the front row.
When he was criticised and challenged many years later by certain party members, he angrily declared that he was one of the founding members of the party.
The charismatic leader and the ‘unloved’ PM
Over the years, Simitis’ relationship with the left-wing populist PASOK founder Papandreou went through periods of strong tensions, as evidenced by Simitis’ three resignations from ministerial posts in the 1980s, predicated in part by the former’s firm dedication to fiscal discipline.
As personalities, the two could hardly be more different.
Papandreou was the epitome of the charismatic leader, who could sway the masses with his charm and unparalleled oratorical skills, a talent he inherited from his father, Georgios Papandreou (who became known with the moniker “the old man of democracy, when in 1965 he was toppled through a palace coup, and commenced his famed “relentless struggle”).
That his son earned the love and strong devotion of a majority of the Greek people is evidenced by the fact that everyone referred to him as Andreas, and hardly ever with his surname.
Simitis, for his part, was on the other end of the political spectrum on the visceral level, unloved by the people but respected for his great skills and effectiveness as a highly disciplined technocrat.
His success in completing major infrastructure projects – from the Athens Metro (linked to the requirements of the 2004 Athens Olympics) to the construction of the enormous Rio-Antirrio bridge, linking the Peloponnese to mainland Greece – will be remembered as a major part of his legacy.
Within the party, there developed over time a split between Andreas’s stalwarts and a chunk of the party that framed itself as the “modernising faction”.
Though the term per se is somewhat general and vague, one may say that it denotes a dedication to necessary reforms and a progressive restructuring of the Greek state.
During Simitis’ rule, but also after it, the term “modernisation and moderniser” became a mantra, and a number of formerly PASOK politicians (who are essentially centre-right) and describe themselves thusly, have found safe refuge as ministers and top advisors to the PM in the ruling conservative New Democracy party of Kyriakos Mitsotakis.
The PM has had to perform a tough political balancing act between traditional conservatives and centrist and centre-right politicians. The former are key in maintaining party unity and the latter are pivotal in wooing centrist voters, the voting bloc that is crucial in winning elections.
Greece’s admission to the EMU, economic convergence
One of his two crowning achievements – which ensure Simitis’ legacy as one of the most pro-active and effective PM’s in Greek history – was managing to persuade the EU to admit Greece – after years of strenuous efforts and amidst the strong reservations of Athens’ European partners – into the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), which involves the coordination of economic and fiscal policies, a common monetary policy, and a common currency, the euro.
Throughout his entire tenure as PM, Simitis’s top priority was Greece’s economic convergence, including raising the standard of living, with its EU partners
When Greece’s economic crisis broke out in 2009, a number of its European partners complained that Athens had “cooked the books”, greatly under-reporting the country’s debt and deficit levels, to gain admission to the eurozone.
In any event, membership in the eurozone was a huge step toward guaranteeing the country’s economic and fiscal stability in the long term. It was also crucial in ensuring the country’s economic survival when Greece went bankrupt in 2010, and the EU was forced to participate, along with the IMF, in underwriting the largest ever bailout package, a whopping 110bn euros at first.
The bailout brought unprecedented austerity an inaugurates a huge, decade-long recession – effectively, Greece’s Great Depression.
Hundreds of thousands of Greeks, a large percentage very well-educated – fled the country to seek a better future. The brain drain, now largely reversed, was a huge blow to the country.
Simitis and Cyprus’s EU accession
In his second term, Simitis successfully tackled the seemingly impossible dream of achieving Cyprus’s EU accession without a solution of the Cyprus Problem, through an intricate, long-term strategy that was laid out in the late 1990s.
The main architect of the strategy, which involved bold decisions and the breaking of taboos, was Yiannos Kranidiotis, a Greek Cypriot who was alternate foreign minister when he died in a 1999 aeroplane accident.
The first crucial step was for Greece to lift its EU veto power regarding the start of Turkey’s EU accession process, at a December,1999 EU summit in Helsinki, contrary to decades of Greek policy.
Though many, if not most of Greece’s EU partners were hardly thrilled by the prospect of Ankara’s eventual membership, they always pinned the blame on Athens’ staunch opposition.
After Helsinki, the UN – with the strong support of the Simitis government, commenced its strongest push ever for a solution of the Cyprus problem, in accord with the provisions of a long string of UN Security Council resolutions, which provided for the creation of a bi-zonal bi-communal federation.
That framework, was agreed to by the parties in the mid 1970’s, following Turkey’s 1994 invasion and occupation of nearly 40 percent of the island.
The effort resulted in Annan Plan, staunchly backed by Simitis, for re-unification of the island. It was named after then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and developed by his special envoy Alvaro de Soto, with a strong British input.
By all accounts, Cyprus’s EU accession was predicated on a prior Cyprus settlement. But things did not turn out that way.
Although Simitis boldly supported the Annan plan, he was succeeded on 7 March, 2024 by conservative New Democracy leader Costas Karamanlis, whose neutral stance on the referendums on the plan (separate ones in the Republic of Cyprus and in the Turkish-occupied north) gave a free hand to Cyprus President Tassos Papadopoulos to sway the public,
in an emotionally charged, televised address, he urged his compatriots to resoundingly vote down the plan. They did so with a whopping majority of 76 percent.
Papadopoulos argued that the plan would guarantee Turkish suzerainty over the entire island.“I assumed the leadership of a state. I will not turn over a community,” he declared.
The arduous work over several years by Simitis and his government (with George Papandreou as foreign minister) was dramatically overturned in one fell swoop.
The dark pages of the Simitis era
Simitis’ handling of the January, 1996 Greek-Turkish Imia crisis -and the ensuing Madrid Declaration of the two countries a year-and-a-half later – was the start of a series of Turkish challenges to Greece’s sovereignty over its Aegean islands, that continue to this day.
The crisis, that brought the two countries to the brink of war, began just a few weeks after Simitis replaced Andreas Papandreou as PM, and the public viewed his handling of the affair as a grave national humiliation.
The US-brokered resolution (with the direct involvement of President Bill Clinton and envoy Richard Holbrooke) provided that neither Greece (whose sovereignty over the two uninhabited rock islets was previously undisputed) provided that the two countries would permanently refrain from having flags on the islands or stationing ships or troops near them.
That was the first step for Turkey to lodge expansive claims that there were “grey zones” regarding sovereignty over many Greek islands.
That was sealed a year-and-a-half later with the Greek-Turkish “Madrid Declaration”, over which Simitis was once again blasted.
It provided in vague and general terms respect for the “vital interests” of both countries in the Aegean, allowing Ankara in the future to expand its claims as it sought fit.
PASOK party sinks Simitis’ most vital reform
His own party has been viewed by many as an albatross for Simitis in pursuing his reform agenda, most notably his most radical proposed structural reform, in 2001, providing for a deep overhaul of the insurance system that would ensure its long-term viability.
With an uproar and huge demonstrations over a long period by the country’s two biggest umbrella unions (private and public sector) a majority of PASOK’s MPs opposed the bill. One might say that for them it was a matter of political survival.
In 2021, the competent labour and minister, Tasos Giannitsis, who tabled the reform in 2001, said that if the bill had been implemented, Greece would certainly have averted its future bankruptcy, as between 2000 and 2010, 80 percent of public spending went to supporting the insurance system.
The 1999 stock market crash and the blossoming of corruption
The Athens Stock Exchange boom and bust (the latter in September, 1999), which the Simitis government, with an extremely weak regulatory authority, did almost nothing to avert (rather the contrary), is considered perhaps the greatest scandal ever in Greece.
A million-and-a-half Greek investors, a huge number of which were small investors who lost their life savings by investing in bubble stocks, fell victim to the encouragement to play the market of government officials, financial figures, economists, and the financial press, all of which built a false sense of security and faith in the artificially booming bourse.
Even as the stock market was plunging toward an inevitable crash, government officials urged investors to have faith in a rebound that never came.
Simitis’ ‘untouchable’ corrupt ministers
If there were any doubt about the blossoming of kickbacks during Simitis’ term in office – from state construction, health and defence contractors – the case of the late defence minister, Akis Tsochatzopoulos – once the number two of Andreas Papandreou – indicates that Simitis gave a free hand to top ministers, allowing them to administer their own fiefdums.
At a time that Greece was in the midst of its largest military spending programmes the defence minister received kickbacks from programmes including the purchase of German HDW Feerostaal submarines (which received attention in the German press) and the procurement TOR-M1 tanks.
Due to his history and sway over the large Papandreist, one might say, wing of the party – Simitis treated his minister as untouchable, even though among other things his unabashedly lavish lifestyle, particularly in his later years, bore witness to the fact that he was on the take big time.
It would be a significant stretch of the imagination to think that the highly educated and intelligent PM was clueless.
On 11 April, 2013, a court convicted Tsochatzopoulos on money-laundering charges and handed down a 20-year jail sentence (later reduced to 19 years) for receiving huge kickbacks from military procurement contracts, mainly between 1996-2001.
The legacy
At the end of the day, Simitis’ legacy can be called a mixed bag.
If one were to metaphorically liken it to a painting, it was clearly chiaroscuro.
It remains for future historians to assess whether the light outweighed the darkness.
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