Former Greek PM Costas Simitis dies

Costas Simitis, the former prime minister of Greece — regarded as a modernizer who played a key role in shaping the country's eurozone membership — has died at the age of 88.

Simitis co-founded the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) party in 1974 and eventually became the successor to the party's founding leader, Andreas Papandreou.

How will he be remembered?

The often contentious relationship between the fiery populist Papndreou and the mild pragmatist Simitis helped shape the party.

Simitis succeeded Papandreou as Greece's prime minister in 1996 and was in the role until 2004.

Simitis was the prime minister who ushered the country into the European Union's single currency in 2001. He died at his summer house in the Peloponnese.

"With sadness and respect, I bid farewell to Costas Simitis, a worthy and noble political opponent, but also the prime minister who accompanied Greece in its great national steps," Greece's conservative Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said in a statement.

Mitsotakis hailed Simitis as "a personality who, undoubtedly, leaves his own imprint on the development of the country, throughout the last decades."

Simitis studied law in Germany and was a resistance fighter during Greece's seven-year dictatorship, which lasted from 1967 to 1974. He fled the country in 1969 to avoid arrest.

As a former law professor, he was a founding member of the PASOK party formed in 1974 by socialist firebrand Papandreou. Serving as a minister for the economy and later industry, the austerity-minded Simitis clashed with Papandreou and his fiscally relaxed policies on multiple occasions. 

While Simitis considered Greece's entry into the eurozone, in January 2001, as his crowning achievement once he became prime minister, he also helped land the 2004 Olympic Games for Athens and presided over a huge infrastructure-building program.

rc/wd (AP, dpa, Reuters)