Theodoros Pangalos, outspoken Greek former international minister, dies at 84

Theodoros Pangalos, a former Greek international minister recognized for his undiplomatic outbursts and on whose watch Greece suffered one in every of its most embarrassing international coverage debacles in 1999, has died. He was 84.

Pangalos’ household stated on Twitter that he died on Wednesday “peacefully at home, surrounded by his family and close associates.”

Caretaker Prime Minister Ioannis Sarmas’ workplace expressed condolences, as did different main Greek politicians. An announcement from Sarmas’ workplace praised the “dynamic and decisive” former minister who stood out for his “sharp and substantial intellect.”

Born on Aug, 17, 1938, Pangalos was the grandson of a former Greek army dictator. He studied legislation in Athens and economics in Paris, was concerned in left-wing politics and actively opposed the brand new army regime of 1967-1974.

He turned a senior official within the Socialist Pasok celebration, based by Andreas Papandreou, that dominated the political scene in many of the Nineteen Eighties and Nineteen Nineties, however inherited the nation’s monetary disaster in 2009 and step by step imploded – along with the general public funds.

It was throughout the early levels of the disaster, amid deep revenue cuts, hovering unemployment and livid anti-austerity protests, that Pangalos uttered the phrase for which he’ll maybe be most remembered, and has been broadly reviled.

“The answer to the opprobrium the country’s politicians face from people asking ‘how did you squander the money?’ is this: ‘We gave you public sector jobs. We all ate from the trough,” Pangalos stated in Parliament in 2010.

“It was all in the framework of a relationship of political clientelism, corruption, bribery and debasement of the very meaning of politics,” he added.

At the time, he was deputy prime minister within the Socialist authorities of George Papandreou – Andreas’ son – and his feedback had been condemned as cynical, unfair and insensitive. At the identical time, his defenders argued that he had supplied a harsh however largely correct epitaph to 3 a long time of Greek politics, wherein he had performed a big half.

Pangalos went on to write down a ebook known as “We all ate from the trough,” however by no means held public workplace after 2012.

He had a protracted historical past of unguarded remarks, having managed, as international minister within the Nineteen Nineties, to offend Germany – which he in comparison with a “giant with a child’s brain” – and Turkey, after he referred to Turks as “thieves and rapists.”

Days after Pangalos turned international minister in January 1996, Greece and Turkey got here to the brink of struggle over two uninhabited japanese Aegean Sea islets, often known as Imia in Greece and Kardak in Turkey. Turkish commandos captured one in every of them as the 2 nations’ navies congregated to the spot, however left beneath a U.S.-brokered settlement.

A better embarrassment got here in 1999, when neighboring Turkey’s most needed fugitive, Abdullah Ocalan, the pinnacle of the secessionist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), was smuggled into Greece with out the federal government’s data. Greece’s international ministry made a ham-handed bid to eliminate the new potato by sneaking Ocalan overseas and attempting to cover him within the Greek Embassy in Kenya. The secret was badly saved, and Ocalan was finally delivered to Kenyan authorities, ending up on a aircraft to Turkey the place life imprisonment awaited him.

Apart from the Foreign Ministry, Pangalos held a succession of presidency posts, together with the tradition portfolio, beneath Andreas Papandreou and in different Pasok governments.

Center-right former Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who is predicted to win a basic election on June 25, praised Pangalos on Wednesday for his “intelligence, cosmpolitanism, humor and courage,” and extolled his dedication to Greece’s place within the European Union in addition to his contribution to Cyprus’ EU accession.