In his first term, Mr. Simitis set about curtailing Greece’s extravagant public and private spending and sought to prepare the economy to meet European Union targets for his country’s entry into the eurozone. He had succeeded in reducing inflation and public indebtedness while stabilizing the drachma currency.
His cautious manner offered a marked contrast with the Papandreou years.
“We needed someone who would say less and do more, a person who is an ordinary Greek, who doesn’t descend from on high, and who doesn’t hide problems with endless myths,” Dimitris Rappas, a government spokesman, told The New York Times in 1996.
Mr. Simitis won a second term in 2000, but only by a wafer-thin majority and far short of the endorsement he had sought against his main challenger, Kostas Karamanlis, the leader of the New Democracy Party. It was on Mr. Simitis’s watch, too, that Greece finally made its reckoning with the feared November 17 urban terrorist movement that emerged from a popular struggle against the American-supported military officers who took power in 1967.
In 2002, an injured bomber began to talk and, as a result, the police made a slew of arrests that persuaded the authorities to say that most of the organization had been rounded up. Theodore Couloumbis, a political analyst, said at the time that the country had undergone a “sea change.”
“We’ve crossed the threshold from an unstable democracy to a consolidated one,” he said.
Two years later, though, Mr. Simitis resigned as PASOK chairman and said he would not contest the forthcoming election, in which his party lost to New Democracy. He was succeeded as head of PASOK by George Papandreou, a son of Andreas Papandreou who, at the time, was Greece’s foreign minister.
