Jacques Delors, former president of the European Commission, "father of the euro" and a leading figure in the French left, died at the age of 98. This was reported by his daughter Martina Aubry for AFP.
"He died this morning (December 27) at his home in Paris in his sleep," Lille's Socialist mayor said.
Jacques Delors was a true socialist, outraged by injustice and eager to change the course of things. But history will remember him as one of the great Christian Democrats who built Europe. This is his paradox. He epitomized the European Commission's golden age, paving the way for the euro alongside François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl.
In France, however, Delors is known as the man of austerity, the "simple Jeremiah" derided by Raymond Barr, the indecisive man who let his desires grow before finally deciding not to run for president in 1995. This missed meeting with the French it torments him. "Either I was lying to the country or I was lying to the socialists," he explained relentlessly, pointing out the discrepancy between his very second left-wing project and the near-revolutionary discourse of the first secretary of the socialists at the time, Henri Emanueli.
A former economy minister under Francois Mitterrand (1981-1984), Delors dashed the left's hopes by refusing to run in the 1995 French presidential election, when he was the clear favorite in opinion polls. He did so with a spectacular televised retirement in front of 13 million viewers.
“I'm not sorry, but I'm also not saying I was right,” he told Poin magazine in 2021. “I was too concerned about independence and felt different from the people around me. My way of doing politics was not the same as the others'.
Head of the European Commission from 1985 to 1995, Jacques Delors played the role of architect in shaping the contours of modern Europe: the creation of the single market, the signing of the Schengen agreements, the Single European Act, the launch of the Erasmus student exchange program , the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy, the start of work on the Economic and Monetary Union, which led to the creation of the Euro, etc.
In March 2020, he called on EU heads of state and government to show greater solidarity as they debated a common response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
With his think tanks - "Club témoin" and "Notre Europe" (which later became the "Institut Jacques Delors" and has offices in Paris, Brussels and Berlin), he advocated until the end the strengthening of European federalism, calling for more "audacity" at a time of Brexit and attacks from "populists of every calibre". /BGNES
