Theodoros Pangalos, a historic member of the PASOK party and a former minister and deputy premier under PASOK governments, died on Wednesday. His family announced the news of his death in a post on social media.
Pangalos was born in 1938 in a family of Armed Forces officers, including his father who was one of the first pilots of the Hellenic Air Force and his grandfather, a namesake who was a general and a dictator of Greece (1925-26).
The younger Pangalos studied law and economics and the University of Athens and joined the struggle against the junta of 1967. In 1973 he completed a doctorate at the University of Paris 1 (Pantheon-Sorbonne) in economics, where he also worked, while the dictators in Greece stripped him of his Greek citizenship which was reinstated after the junta fell in 1974.
In 1978, Pangalos ran for Elefsina unsuccessfully after having joined PASOK and Andreas Papandreou at its inception in 1974.
He first won a seat in Parliament for Attica in 1981 under the socialist party, and never lost an election after that. In Papandreou’s first cabinet, he was appointed minister of trade and later transferred to the foreign ministry as deputy minister responsible for European affairs.
Pangalos served on several PASOK committees, and was later appointed deputy premier and alternate prime minister of Greece when the socialist party won the elections of October 2009 under Andreas Papandreou’s son George.
He kept this position in both cabinet reshuffles, and remained deputy premier under the interim government of Lucas Papademos.
He retired from active politics shortly before the elections of May 2012.
Commenting in an e-book he wrote in 2012 on the party’s mismanagement of European funding under the senior Papandreou, he wrote, “In one way or another, we participated in non-rational practices and behaviors through time, in relation to the state’s expenditures and revenues. What we call ‘fiscal crisis’ has been one of our own creations too.”
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