Reluctance in France and Britain saved the dedication to political unity, an aspirational United States of Europe, weak. Nonetheless, 4 nations — Austria, Norway, Finland and Sweden — joined the union throughout Mr. Delors’s presidency.
Mr. Delors’s married Marie Lephaille in 1948. She died in 2020. Their son, Jean-Paul, died of leukemia in 1982. Their daughter, Ms. Aubry, is a outstanding Socialist politician and the longtime mayor of Lille, a metropolis in northern France. Along with her, Mr. Delors’s survivors embody a granddaughter.
Towards the top of his tenure, Mr. Delors was more and more perceived as arrogantly bent on strengthening the facility of the European Union over its member states. Critics say the rise of a faculty of euroskeptic politicians in France, Britain and Denmark within the Nineteen Nineties was a response to his overreach and part of his legacy.
He remained well-liked in France, nonetheless. In 1994, he declined to run for president, despite the fact that polls put him comfortably forward of Jacques Chirac, the eventual victor.
He was additionally held up, wistfully, as a mannequin of management by some in Europe within the depths of the euro disaster.
“If Delors was in cost in Europe, Mitterrand in France and Kohl in Germany,” Theodoros Pangalos, the deputy prime minister of Greece, mentioned in 2010, “issues wouldn’t be the identical.”
Paul Lewis, a former European correspondent for The Instances, died in 2022. Landon Thomas, Aurelien Breeden and Herbert Buchsbaum contributed reporting.
