Jacques Delors, former European Commission chief and a founding father of the European Union’s (EU) historic single currency project, has died. He was 98.

* The French socialist and ardent advocate of post-war European integration died in his sleep at his Paris home on Wednesday (27th Dec 2023), his family said.

* Delors served as president of the European Commission for three terms – longer than any other holder of the office – from January 1985 until the end of 1994.

* During Delors’s decade as the European Commission chief, the EU completed its integrated single market and agreed to introduce a single currency, the euro, and built a common foreign and security policy.

* The then-12-nation bloc also set the conditions on his watch for eventually admitting the former communist states of Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

* Delors also served as finance minister under French President Francois Mitterrand from 1981 to 1984.

* But he declined to run for the presidency in 1995 despite being overwhelmingly ahead in the polls, a decision he put down to “a desire for independence that was too great”.

* “I have no regrets,” he said about that decision later. “But I am not saying I was right.”

* The current French President Emmanuel Macron paid tribute to the former EU leader as an “inexhaustible architect of our Europe” and a fighter for human justice..


Source : Aljazeera