In his first term, Simitis set out to reduce Greece’s extravagant public and private spending and sought to prepare the economy to meet the European Union’s goals for his country’s entry into the eurozone. He had managed to reduce inflation and public debt and at the same time stabilize the drachma currency.
His cautious attitude offered a stark contrast to the Papandreou years.
“We needed someone who would say less and do more, a person who was an ordinary Greek, who did not descend from above and who did not hide his problems with endless myths,” government spokesman Dimitris Rappas told The New York Times in 1996.
Simitis won a second term in 2000, but only by a slim majority and well short of the support he had sought against his main rival, Kostas Karamanlis, the leader of the New Democracy Party. It was also under Simitis’ leadership that Greece finally came to terms with the feared November 17 urban terrorist movement that emerged from a general struggle against the US-backed military officers who seized power in 1967.
In 2002, an injured attacker began to speak out and, as a result, police made a series of arrests that persuaded authorities to say that most of the organization had been arrested. Theodore Couloumbis, a political analyst, said at the time that the country had undergone a “radical change.”
“We have crossed the threshold from an unstable democracy to a consolidated one,” he said.
However, two years later, Simitis resigned as president of PASOK and said he would not participate in the next elections, in which his party lost to New Democracy. George Papandreou, son of Andreas Papandreou, who at that time was Minister of Foreign Affairs of Greece, succeeded him as PASOK leader.
