For both fans and foes of the European project, former European Commission president Jacques Delors was Brussels’ driving force during the EU’s greatest period of integration, the creation of the single market and the euro.
In his native France the statesman was a respected figure in the remaking of the centre-left under former French president Francois Mitterrand. Dead on Wednesday at the age of 98, the champion of an ever closer EU and the bugbear of British Thatcherites received tributes from across the continent he sought to unite.
“Generations of Europeans will continue to benefit from his legacy,” said European Parliament President Roberta Metsola, a Maltese conservative hailing a French socialist.
Photo: Reuters
Another conservative, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, said: “Jacques Delors was a visionary who made our Europe stronger. His life’s work is a united, dynamic and prosperous European Union.”
Delors stood down as president of the European Commission in 1995 after disappointing his French supporters by declining to stand for office as president of his homeland.
However, he had already played a transformative role as the European Community, which became the EU during his term, took on a central role in the continent’s affairs.
This reflected his previous role under Mitterrand as the French minister of finance, as he imposed rigor on public accounts and rewrote the romantic language of the center-left in a more “realist” register. In 1984, Mitterrand wanted to make Delors prime minister, but he offended the president by asking to keep his finance portfolio alongside the top job, and he was sidelined.
Mitterrand would later declare bitterly: “He’ll be remembered for his role at the European Commission, but in politics: zero.”
However, it would indeed be in his Brussels role that Delors would enter history, taking the job of EU chief executive in 1985 after two years in the European Parliament.
Delors’ vision of Europe as a federation of nation states and his workaholic doggedness would see him compared to the post-war founders of the European project, former High Authority of the European Coal and Steel Community president Jean Monnet and former European Parliament president Robert Schuman.
Under the Delors presidency the man who had once reassured world markets that France’s budget was in safe hands would lay the foundation of what would become Europe’s monetary union.
A passionate educationalist, he would also found the Erasmus program of university exchanges, helping educate a whole new generation of young Europeans with a greater EU identity.
This passion for closer union also made him enemies. Across the Channel in the UK, former British prime ministers Margaret Thatcher and John Major adopted him as a foil — the archetypal “Brussels bureaucrat,” constraining British sovereignty.
In 1990, top-selling British tabloid the Sun urged its readers to take to the streets at midday and to raise a two-fingered salute in Brussels’ direction under the front-page headline: “Up yours Delors.”
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