Wilfried Martens - Telegraph During the 1970s Martens demonstrated exceptional skills as a negotiator, and in the wake of the resignation of Leo Tindemans's CVP-led administration in October 1978 - despite being only 42 years old and having no previous ministerial experience - Martens was invited by Belgium's King Baudouin to form a government. His installation as Prime Minister in April 1979 brought to an end a six-month crisis during which the country had been ruled by a caretaker administration. Martens continued to demonstrate the shrewdness that had marked him out as an aspiring politician. In 1986, for example, the language row erupted in an emotional public debate over the status of Jose Happart, a French-speaking mayor in a Flemish-speaking province who refused to prove that he could speak Flemish. Martens brought the crisis to a head by offering to resign, a calculated move that calmed tempers. After a few days, he allowed himself to be persuaded to stay on in office. The issue flared up again in October 1987, and Martens tried the same tactic. This time, King Baudouin accepted his resignation and his administration fell. But the King kept Martens in office and instructed him to form a new government following elections scheduled for December. These did not go well and it seemed that Martens would lose office; but with typical shrewdness he ditched his Right-wing coalition partners in favour of the Socialists and bounced back . Martens was also the chief architect of another compromise that averted a constitutional crisis in early 1990 when the devoutly Roman Catholic monarch refused to sign a law legalising abortion. Martens got parliament's approval to use an obscure law that allowed legislation to go through if the King was "temporarily" unable to reign. The result was that Baudouin abdicated for one day and then resumed his duties. Wilfried Martens remained Prime Minister until 1992, when he handed over to another party colleague, Jean-Luc Dehaene, after the withdrawal of the Flemish national grouping from the ruling coalition and the strong showing of the far-Right Vlaams Blok in parliamentary elections held in November 1991. In 1994 Martens entered the European Parliament and became chairman of the European People's Party (EPP), the Christian Democrat formation which he had co-founded in 1976 and which he had served as president from 1990. In his role as head of the nominal allies of British Conservative MEPs, Martens proved to be something of an irritant to the government of John Major. In 1994, when Major spoke in favour of a looser association of nation states, Martens argued that true Europeans should ignore Euro-sceptics attached to the "pseudo-popular sovereignty of the nation state"," and rejected the idea that the pace of integration should be dictated by the most reluctant. While Martens's public image was one of grey Belgian bourgeois respectability, his political career ended in circumstances that owed more to the colourful intricacies of Belgian surrealism. In 1998 he abandoned his wife of 30 years, Lieve Vershroeven, with whom he had two grown-up daughters, and married his lover, Ilse Schouteden, who two years earlier had given birth to their twin daughters. The following year, allegedly egged on by Ilse, he refused to accept second place in the CD&V's list of candidates for the European elections, a position that would have placed him behind Miet Smet, a Belgian Minister of Labour who was also widely reported to have been his mistress and for whom the new Mrs Martens had once worked as a secretary. Humiliatingly for Martens, however, the party reaffirmed its original list and, while he remained president of the EPP, he was forced to retire from the European Parliament. In 2007 there was a further twist when Martens divorced Ilse. The following year he married Miet Smet, his former rival for the number one slot on the party list. Both his second and third weddings were civil ceremonies, but after the death of his first wife earlier this year, Martens was able to celebrate his third marriage in the Catholic Church. Wilfried Martens is survived by his wife and children. Wilfried Martens, born April 19 1936, died October 9 2013