Between 1985 and 1995, during the ten years he chaired the European Commission, Jacques Delors built the contours of the European Union as we know it today. The creation of the internal market, the signing of the Schengen Agreements, the Single European Act, the launch of the Erasmus programme, the reform of the common agricultural policy, the beginning of the construction of the economic and monetary union that laid the foundation for the euro, there are many more. legacies of Mr Europa, who died this Wednesday at the age of 98.
“He died this morning at his home in Paris, while he was sleeping,” Martine Aubry, Socialist president of the Lille Chamber and daughter of Delors, told AFP.
Jacques Delors, an unavoidable name on the French left, dashed the hopes of this party wing by refusing to stand as a candidate in France’s 1995 presidential elections. He was a favorite in the polls at the time and shocked part of the electorate with a television advertisement seen by more than 13 million French people. “I don’t regret it,” but “I’m not saying I was right,” he told Le Point in 2021, clarifying: “I was too concerned about independence and felt different from the people around me. My way of doing politics was not theirs.” But shortly before his death, he confided to Le Monde: “Yes, sometimes I regret not having dared. Maybe I was wrong.”
As an only child, born seven years after the end of the First World War, Jacques Delors grew up in Paris where you could still play football in the street with your friends. As a diligent student, he wanted to become a journalist, filmmaker or even a seamstress, as his biographer Gabriel Milesi writes. When World War II began, his father, Louis, a debt collector at the Bank of France, convinced him as a teenager that “there is nothing better” than working there.
The young man accepts his fate, not without continuing to play basketball, founding a film club or joining the French Confederation of Christian Workers. But it is on the bench that he meets his wife Marie, a Basque woman with a Christian faith as strong as his own, with whom he has two children, Martine, in 1950, and Jean-Paul, three years later.
Trade union work will serve as a springboard into politics for him, after working with Prime Minister Jacques Chaban-Delmas. In the Socialist Party he joined the current François Mitterrand and was appointed Minister of Economy and Finance in 1981. Four years later, supported by Mitterrand and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, he became president of the European Commission.
In this condition he was in Jerónimos in 1985 at the signing ceremony of the Treaty of Accession of Portugal to the European Economic Community (EEC), together with the then Portuguese Prime Minister Mário Soares.
After completing his two terms at the head of the Commission and after resigning to run for the 1995 presidential elections in France, where Jacques Chirac defeated socialist Lionel Jospin in the second round, Delors eventually withdrew from public life after he published his memoirs in 2004 (Memoirspublished in Portugal by Quetzal editors).
Something that did not stop him from continuing to defend the strengthening of European federalism to the end, by calling for more “boldness” during the Brexit negotiations or in the face of attacks from “populists of all kinds”.
At the time of his death he was the target of a chorus of praise. French President Emmanuel Macron praised Delors as a “tireless craftsman of Europe” who “fought for human justice.” Current European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen responded in a statement, saying: “We are all heirs to Jacques Delors’ life’s work: a dynamic and prosperous European Union. Jacques Delors has forged his vision of a united and centered Europe. in his commitment to peace during the dark hours of World War II.”
Portuguese Durão Barroso, who served as President of the European Commission between 2004 and 2014, also recalled that with Delors’ death, Europe “lost one of its most extraordinary leaders. Someone who combined the small steps of European integration with the ideal of a United Europe.” And President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa issued a note declaring: “He is a man of great letters who left us today.”
The Portuguese government will declare a day of national mourning – “the date will be determined in due course, through European coordination or on the day of the funeral,” said the note released by António Costa’s office.
With agencies
Source: DN
