Costas Simitis, co-founder of the Greek Socialist Party (Pasok), and former prime minister from 1996 to 2004, died on Sunday January 5, at the age of 88, during a family stay in his second home in the Peloponnese. He was one of the last great figures of Greek socialism, undermined since the debt crisis of the 2010s.
Faced with the imposing figure and fine words of Andréas Papandreou, president of Pasok since 1974 and twice head of government, Costas Simitis was more discreet and pragmatic. The two acolytes had met in exile in Germany while the colonels were in power in Greece (1967-1974).
Costas Simitis comes from a family with strong left-wing roots: his father, a lawyer, was a resistance fighter during the German occupation and his mother, a well-known feminist activist. From his youth, he demonstrated against right-wing governments and more particularly against the military junta. He even went so far as to plant incendiary devices against the dictatorship, which forced him to flee to Germany in 1969 to escape the police.
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Source: Lemonde