Europe

Former EU Commission president Jacques Delors dies aged 98

French former minister for finance was central to the introduction of the euro

Jacques Delors was a minister in the Mitterand government in France. Photograph: Jean Guichard/Sygma via Getty Images

Wed Dec 27 2023 - 22:05

Former European Commission president Jacques Delors has died, French news agency AFP reported on Wednesday, citing his daughter Martine Aubry. He was 98.

The French former minister for finance led the bloc’s executive branch from 1985 to 1995 and was central to the introduction of the euro.

A working-class Frenchman who rose to Europe’s highest office, Delors helped build the border-free single market, paved the way to the common currency and oversaw the expansion of the European Union from 10 to 15 countries.

The 11th president of the Brussels-based commission, Delors was more powerful than his predecessors, partly because of the patronage of German chancellor Helmut Kohl and French president Francois Mitterand, the EU’s dominant tandem at the time.

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On the other side was British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who supported the 1986 decision to create a single market but opposed Delors’s later plans for more social legislation and a common currency. She derided the latter as a “rush of blood to the head”.

Delors became closely associated with the euro when he headed a committee that issued a report in 1989 calling for a single currency as the capstone of the planned barrier-free market. The internal market became a reality in 1993.

Over British objections, the Delors Report led to the 1991 negotiations in Maastricht, Netherlands, that laid out the blueprint for the euro and the European Central Bank. Britain opted out of the process.

When it took effect in 1993, the Maastricht Treaty formally created the EU, though it didn’t go as far as Delors wanted toward a European federal state.

Reappointed in 1988 and again in 1992, Delors became a lightning rod for criticism of grand European projects, summed up in a notorious tabloid headline – “Up Yours Delors” – in Britain’s Sun newspaper.

In a statement on Wednesday night, president Michael D Higgins said Delors “will be rightly remembered as one of the foremost advocates for the best of what might be a truly inclusive European Union.”

“He was among those who continued to advocate for that balance and to developing a Europe of a global and inclusive vision for its citizens, including through the work of the Jacques Delors Institute ... May I extend my sympathies to his daughter Martine Aubry, and to all of his family, colleagues and friends.”

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said “We owe so much European progress to [Delors’] vision and leadership from the single market and Erasmus to the first moves to European citizenship and the euro.”

Economically and politically, Europe went through a rough patch in Delors’ final years in Brussels. Denmark vetoed and France came close to vetoing the Maastricht Treaty, against the backdrop of a continentwide recession after German unification.

Delors also faced criticism for a lax management culture that led to the scandal that engulfed his successor, Jacques Santer of Luxembourg. Mr Santer’s commission was forced to quit en masse in 1999 over allegations of financial mismanagement.

Delors was born on July 20th 1925, to a working-class family in Paris. He got his first job at 19, following his father into a clerical position at the French central bank after the liberation of Paris during the second World War.

While at the Banque de France, Delors worked toward a degree in economics and banking at the Sorbonne, and joined the Christian trade union movement. Two aims – economic stability and social progress – would form his political credo.

A post at the French economic planning commission followed, in 1962. By the end of the decade Delors was an aide to Jacques Chaban-Delmas, a centre-right prime minister.

At home on the conservative side of the Socialist party and the left wing of France’s conservative parties, Delors finally threw his lot in with the Socialists in the 1970s when Mr Mitterrand became party chief.

Mitterrand’s election in 1981 as the Fifth Republic’s first socialist leader heralded a sea-change in French economic policy. The government nationalised banks, devalued the franc and shovelled money into job-creating programmes.

As finance minister, Delors opposed the economic lunge to the left, and found himself marginalised within the government until widening budget deficits, galloping inflation and a weakening franc forced Mr Mitterrand to change course.

Delors’s hour came in 1983, when Mr Mitterrand agreed to an austerity package. Delors was given wider powers over the economy in a new government, earning credit for France’s economic turnaround and elevating his stature in Europe.

As his time in Brussels wound down, in 1995, Delors toyed with the idea of running for president of France and turned down entreaties by leading Socialists to enter the campaign against the centre-right’s Jacques Chirac, the eventual winner.

“It may be that on my deathbed I will come to regret my decision, but for the moment, I’m living at peace with it,” Delors said at the time.

Delors married Marie Lephaille in 1948. A son, Jean-Paul, died of leukaemia in 1982 at age 29. The couple’s eldest child, Martine Aubry, born in 1950, went into socialist politics, serving as employment minister and mayor of Lille. – Reuters/Bloomberg

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