Yanis Varoufakis: the 'enfant terrible' of economics who wants to return to the Greek Parliament

BarcelonaFor a few months in 2015, Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis and his comrade Alexis Tsipras defied all the economic and political powers of Europe – the feared troika: the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund, and the European Central Bank – when they resisted the austerity plan that Berlin and Brussels wanted to impose on Greece. As Greece's Finance Minister, Varoufakis leaked the content of the Eurogroup discussions and stood up to the men in black who landed in Athens' offices with the aim of brutally dismantling public health and education and applying the austerity recipe, until the people in Greece said enough.

Yanis Varoufakis continues to live off the symbolic capital of those months in 2015 when, as Finance Minister of the Syriza government, he became one of the visible faces of Greece's standoff with the troika. The economist, who left the government after the referendum against the conditions of the third bailout, has not retired from politics or public debate. Today he dedicates himself to defending his recipes in articles in the Greek and international press, giving lectures, and above all, preparing for the next electoral battle. Greece must hold elections before July 2027.

The economist will try to get his party, MeRA25, which he founded as the Greek branch of the pan-European DiEM25 movement, back into the Greek Parliament, from which it was excluded in the 2023 elections. Nor did it manage to make the leap to Brussels in the 2024 European elections: the party obtained 2.54% of the votes in Greece and was left without representation in the Eurochamber. Tsipras has just returned to Greek politics and will also be a candidate, but it is unlikely that both will end up joining forces against the conservative government. Tsipras wrote in his memoirs that Varoufakis acted "like an egoistical celebrity".