When Syriza was voted out of office in July 2019, the once great hope of the European left could not even claim partial successes. Elected in January 2015 on the promise of saving Greece from austerity, in its early months the government led by Alexis Tsipras insisted that it was preparing a confrontation with the Troika of European institutions. Yet just hours after a referendum on July 5, 2015 in which 61 percent of Greeks refused a fresh round of austerity, Tsipras folded to European demands. After further memoranda swallowed by Syriza, Greece is set to remain subject to Troika policies until 2060.

Tsipras’s capitulation on referendum night also saw the departure of Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis. Throughout the first months of the Syriza government he had done battle with Greece’s creditors at the Eurogroup — the informal, indeed secretive meeting of eurozone finance ministers which exercises effective political control over the single currency. At thirteen Eurogroup meetings, Varoufakis insisted that Europe should plan debt relief rather than continue with eternal austerity in the name of a debt that could never be paid. Yet his appeals to abandon the strategy of “extend and pretend” were quickly shut down.

Greece may have drifted out of the headlines, but austerity measures continue apace — and the institutions running the eurozone remain as opaque as ever. On February 14, 2020, Varoufakis — today a member of the Greek parliament for the MeRA25 party — offered the parliament’s president a USB stick with his recordings of the fateful Eurogroup meetings from 2015. The president refused to accept them: but Varoufakis is now promising to publish them online early in March.