European Union President Jacques Delors listens to a question during a press conference. File/Reuters

Jacques Delors, a passionate advocate of post-war European integration and a founding father of the European Union's single currency project, has died, his family said. He was 98.

The French socialist 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, a time of rapid change for Europe's emerging union.

The era was marked by forthright clashes of vision between federalists such as Delors, who believed passionately in an "ever closer union", and Britain's then prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who firmly resisted any shift of power to Brussels.

So antagonistic did relations between London and Brussels become towards the end of Thatcher's time in office, especially over the plans for monetary union, that The Sun tabloid famously ran a front page headline reading: "Up Yours Delors".

Delors' death came three years after Britain fully exited the EU on Dec. 31, 2020, following tortuous negotiations and 47 years of membership.

Delors, a Catholic trade unionist with a background in economic planning, was an outspoken force at the heart of the Brussels bureaucracy, tirelessly crafting compromises among member states to build the European single market, one of the EU's defining achievements.

He oversaw a period of rapid enlargement, with the 10-member European Community, as it was then called, growing to 12 with the accession in 1986 of Spain and Portugal and then adding Sweden, Austria and Finland in 1995.

The era was defined by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany, as the tectonic plates underpinning modern Europe shifted. The post-war ideal of a unified continent - the dream of federalists - began to seem real.

Delors' commitment to a united Germany led to a close bond with then German chancellor Helmut Kohl and helped to cement the Franco-German relationship that remains critical to the EU.

Reuters