PARIS: Former European Commission President Jacques Delors, a founding father of the EU’s historic single currency project, died on Wednesday at the age of 98.
Delors, an ardent advocate of post-war European integration, served as president of the European Commission, the EU executive, for three terms — longer than any other holder of the office — from January 1985 until the end of 1994.
During Delors’ dynamic decade as Commission chief, the EU completed its integrated single market and agreed to introduce a single currency and build a common foreign and security policy.
The then 12-nation bloc also set the conditions on his watch for eventually admitting the ex-communist states of central and eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
His daughter, Martine Aubry, the socialist mayor of Lille, told that her father died in his sleep at his Parisian home.
French President Emmanuel Macron paid tribute to his compatriot calling him a “tireless creator of our Europe.”
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