The next Greek elections may be not be in sight for at least a year, but Yanis Varoufakis stepped in to name himself as a contender for the Prime Minister hot seat.
The controversial former Finance Minister of the first Tsipras administration has recently launched his political party, MERA25, an acronym for ‘Front of European Realistic Disobedience’, the number standing for 2025, the year set as deadline for European Reform to have been achieved, as the mandate of Varoufakis’ international initiative DiEM25, out of which his party has spawned.
After his resignation from the position of Finance Minister in 2015, after the Greek government’s decision to back down from its initial anti-austerity policy and fully concede to the terms of the bailout program imposed by the country’s lenders, Varoufakis has rebranded himself as an anti-austerity campaigner and a very vocal critic of the European Union’s political failures and shortcomings.
His ‘Movement for Democracy in Europe (by) 2025′ has gained support in France, Germany, Ireland, Portugal, Poland, Lithuania and the UK, among other EU countries, and been endorsed by intellectual activists such as Canadian journalist and writer Naomi Klein, US linguist professor Noam Chomsky and British musician Brian Eno.
In an interview with Turkish state-run news station TRT World, Varoufakis repeated his version of the negotiations process between Greece and the troika on the build-up to the controversial referendum, which resulted in the Greek people dismissing the bailout policies.
“When you’re representing the bankrupt country you need two things, in order for your presence at that table to make a difference: you need the support of your people, that we had, and you want the support of your cabinet that, I did not have,” Varoufakis told to journalist Imran Garda. “If my prime minister backed my default, we would have changed Europe,” he argued and stressed: “I’ve never felt helpless in Brussels. I’ve felt helpless in Athens, when I realised that my own comrades had capitulated”.
“So the way you’re going about this now is in order to essentially become the prime minister of Greece?” asked the Turkish journalist, to which the firebrand economics-professor-turned-politician responded: “It sounds like a nightmare to become the prime minister of Greece, but then again, it’s a dirty job, somebody has to do it.”
Varoufakis’ proposals for Greece include public debt restructuring, a tax cut, and the creation of a state-run ‘bad bank’ to manage household debt and protect debtors from foreclosures.