On the day we formed a government, we had completed five years of languishing at the bottom of austerity’s barrel, with a population that was engulfed in a humanitarian crisis. We had suicides; we had deaths of despair; we had people who went untreated because they couldn’t afford medicine; we had a reduction of pensions and wages by 40 percent.

Due to the faulty architecture of the eurozone, following the bankruptcy of the German and French banks, Greece was the country whose state went bankrupt. It began on Wall Street, then it moved on to Dubai, then it went to the French and German banks.

They stopped refinancing the rather large public debt of the Greek state — which was large because the private debt was low, so it was the exact opposite of Ireland, for example. Total debt was not great in Greece. It was just that the public sector was bloated in terms of its debt. At that point, the Greek state became officially bankrupt.

Instead of accepting that reality, the powers that be — who were absolutely determined to make sure that European citizens bailed out the French, German, and Italian banks, and to some extent the Greek banks as well — decided to transfer the losses of the banking system onto the shoulders of the weakest people.

In practical terms, that was the equivalent of not being able to repay your mortgage because your income has tanked and being forced to take out one credit card after another at high interest rates to pretend that you are still repaying your mortgage. If a friend of yours were to do that, you would immediately say, “Stop doing it — this is suicide.”

We were elected to stop this suicidal dynamic. I accepted the challenge of being part of that government, taking a position in the electric chair of the finance ministry of the most bankrupt European state for a very simple reason. I had presented to my colleagues — to the prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, and his team — a double plan.

The first part of the plan concerned what to do to avert the blackmail that was definitely going to come from the troika and from the financial sector: “Either you sign on the dotted line for another credit card, or we will shut down your banks.” The first part of the plan was the deterrence plan — how to deter that kind of financial terrorism, as I call it.

The second part was what would happen if we failed to deter them and they did close down our banks, as they did in the end. How do we issue our own currency in order to break free from this debtors’ prison?

That was what we entered government with — at least that’s what I thought we entered the government with, until, by the time of the referendum, I realized that my own leadership was not interested in seeing this through. They capitulated, I resigned, and the rest is history, as they say.

Let me say that I didn’t arrive in Brussels, Berlin, or Frankfurt with any great expectations of a rational debate. Yet even though I brought very low expectations in my suitcase, I have to admit that I was taken aback by the orchestrated irrationality and the incredible levels of incompetence as well as cynicism that I encountered.

There were three different dimensions to this experience. First, in private meetings, they startled me because they were incredibly accepting of my narrative at first. I have said this many times, and nobody has denied it.

When I met Christine Lagarde for the first time — she was the managing director of the International Monetary Fund at the time, before she moved over to the presidency of the ECB — she astounded me, because she was extremely sympathetic to my analysis of what had gone wrong and why the austerity programs could not work.

She said, “Of course, Yanis, they cannot work — you’re right.” She actually criticized me from a position to the left of my own thinking because she said that I was being too modest and too moderate in what I was demanding on behalf of my people. I thought, “That was easy — if we can proceed in that way, my job will be done before I even know it.”

However, she then added immediately, “But Yanis, you have to understand that we have put a lot of political capital into this program, and your career and mine both depend on going along with it.” I said to her, “But Christine, you know I don’t give a damn about my political career. I have a mandate from the people, and that’s all I care about. If I stop being finance minister, so what? That’s not my issue.”

Immediately I became persona non grata because I wasn’t playing along. That was the first dimension — I promised you three. At the personal level, I was astounded because they seemed to understand exactly what kind of crime against logic they had been implementing for years before I arrived on the scene.

Then there was a second dimension: the gross incompetence of those people. That astounded me even more, because I was expecting technocrats of some competence — the kind of people that you encounter when you talk to Goldman Sachs types. They may be a clear and present danger for humanity, but nevertheless, they know their stuff. They know their bonds, they know their derivatives, and they know the mechanics of the capitalist financial system.

That wasn’t the case with the troika. I’m not talking about Mario Draghi but rather about the underlings that they were sending to us to have discussions about this and that — privatizations, VAT rates, and so on. If they had been students of mine, talking as a professor, I would have simply failed them in semester one of the first year of their undergraduate degree.

It was remarkable. That was another shock to my system. The third dimension was the pure cynicism of the people mentioned above. When I went to my first meeting of eurozone finance ministers, I went in there with the intention of starting a discussion along collegial lines. I didn’t go in there with any view to be confrontational — exactly the opposite.

If anything, I was far too modest, as Lagarde accused me of being. I said something that I thought was totally in tune with what I imagined the ideology and manners of those people to be:

Ladies and gentlemen, I know that most of you don’t want to see me here, because I represent the radical left of Greece and you would rather deal with our predecessors. But this is what the Greek electorate decided, so now let’s be honest with one another.

There is a program of austerity and bailouts that previous governments signed up to. And because there is, whether I like it or not, a continuity in the state’s obligations to other member states, it’s not the case that you have a new government and all the obligations of previous governments are wiped out.

I acknowledge this continuity of government, despite the fact that we have a new mandate, and our new mandate is to renegotiate and essentially annul those obligations. So what happens in a liberal democracy when two important principles clash?

What are the important principles? One is continuity of government and state. The other is the democratic mandate of a new government. When two different, contradictory principles clash in a liberal democracy, democrats sit around the table and find a compromise.

When I was saying that, I was experiencing feelings of self-doubt, asking myself why I was being so damn moderate. After all, I had just been elected as the finance minister of a radical-left government. But then I thought, “It’s a good way to start the negotiations on a positive, collegial note.”

Yet lo and behold, the late Wolfgang Schäuble, who was the German finance minister, angrily demanded the floor. Clearly, he was discomfited by what I said. Without any introduction welcoming me to the Eurogroup, which is what would normally happen, he went straight to the point. He said, “Elections cannot be allowed to change economic policy in the Eurogroup.”

I have to tell you, I didn’t expect such a degree of cynicism. Of course, it prompted me to say — and I don’t regret saying it — that this must be excellent news for the Communist Party of China, because they also think that elections should not change economic policy.

I didn’t mention the fact that in China, they do change economic policy. They don’t need elections, but when the facts change, economic policy changes. That’s the difference when it comes to Europe. We have elections and governments change, but economic policy — especially failed economic policy — does not change.

There were three groups of countries. First, there were representatives of countries that were within the “vital space” — don’t translate it into German, it’s not a good idea — of the Federal Republic of Germany. This group included countries like Slovakia and Latvia that had imposed austerity upon themselves well before the 2008 crisis.

They had wrecked their own populations with austerity, and they were more royalist than the king, or more German than the German finance minister. They were the most aggressive ones, the ones that were talking about “Grexit” from the beginning — in other words, about jettisoning Greece from the euro, if I dared to continue challenging the memorandum of understanding [MOU] that I had inherited.

They were the bulldogs of Wolfgang Schäuble. He didn’t have to speak, because they would speak first and be so aggressive and abusive that when Schäuble spoke, he seemed like a more reasonable version of them. Allow me an aside: this is more or less the same group that today are gung-ho about not ending the war between Ukraine and Russia. I close the bracket, but I think it’s an important connection to draw.

Then there was a second group of countries that had, like Greece, gone under the iron curtain of the austerity/bailout programs. I’m referring to the countries that you mentioned already — Portugal and Ireland, of course, but also Spain, because Spain had already gone through its own bailout. It was a half-baked one, and it only involved its banks, but still it was officially in a bailout.

Now they were terrified that our government might secure better terms for the people of Greece, because they had subjected their own people to so much unnecessary and vicious pain with their austerity programs. You think of what was going on in Ireland, in Portugal, in Spain for that matter. If our tough negotiating stance were to yield even some small benefits for the Greek people, they were absolutely terrified that their own people would turn against them and say, “Why didn’t you fight for us like the Greek government is fighting for the Greek people?”

They were perhaps even more motivated than Schäuble’s bulldogs to see us fail. They had some sympathy with us because they were in the same boat as we were, but the political representatives were absolutely horrified by the thought that we might succeed in the task of renegotiating our MOU.

There was also a third group of countries like Italy and France — don’t forget France — who feared that they might need a bailout too. They had the most sympathy with us, and they were even more horrified than the other two groups by the thought that Schäuble and Angela Merkel would take out on them any frustration that they felt toward us by pushing them into a bailout.

In other words, what I am trying to describe is a Eurogroup that was impossible to navigate on the basis of rational thinking and economic arguments, because the only determinant of the behavior of those finance ministers was fear. They were all absolutely horrified and terrified by the thought that Greece would become viable as a result of the election of the left-wing government.

If you wanted to create a decision-making body that would simply not pay any attention to the viability of the Eurozone and its member states and care only about making sure that they were prepared to do anything so that nothing would change, that’s the kind of decision-making body that you would create.

Let me make the point that this is why I don’t forgive my former comrades for capitulating. It is not only because of what they did to the Greek people, but also because they were, after Margaret Thatcher, perhaps the worst enemy of the Left across Europe, and maybe worldwide.

I hope you will forgive me if I correct a basic misunderstanding that is embedded in the question in a way that is totally understandable. This is not how I saw or experienced things. I didn’t see the referendum as a way of continuing the fight.

Sadly, my former comrade Alexis Tsipras called the referendum not to win it but to lose it. He had already capitulated, and I was already on the way out while maintaining my position in the finance ministry.

In order to explain what happened with the referendum and how we got to the third bailout program, which wrecked the Left and wrecked the Greek people and rendered Greece a nonviable social economy, I need to start right at the beginning. As I said earlier, Greece was in a debtors’ prison, unless our debt was substantially written off or manipulated in such a way as to be the equivalent of a write-off.

There are very innovative ways of disguising a write-off — debt swaps and this and that. This is what I was proposing to them as a face-saving exercise for the Troika. If you are going to do that, the only way you’re going to be able to do that is if you are ready to walk away. You have to be prepared to imagine exiting the negotiating room and saying, “Folks, there’s an impasse. I’m going to go my own way.”

What does going your own way mean? It means printing your own currency and defaulting on your debt in euros, because if you don’t have the euro, you cannot repay your huge debt in euros, and you suffer the consequences for that, but you regain your autonomy and monetary sovereignty, and you try to start afresh. Unless you’re prepared to do that, there’s no point in entering the negotiating room.

This is what I had said to my colleagues. Of course, it’s not just a question of pressing the nuclear button and saying, “I am stepping out, and I am leaving the eurozone.” There have to be gradations — you must have weapons in between that you must activate to signal your intention to walk out if need be. If you don’t do that, you might as well not get elected.

You’d never enter a negotiation if you were a trade unionist where you couldn’t even imagine walking out. That’s negotiations 101. The only reason why I accepted the finance ministry was because I had put to Alexis Tsipras a very specific proposal of what we needed to do.

I said to him, “Look, the moment we get elected, they will call you from Frankfurt or Brussels or Berlin, and they will say to you, ‘Congratulations, sign on the dotted line or we close down your banks.’ You have to have an answer to that. You have to have a deterrence plan for stopping them from doing it.”

I had come up with an idea. I still believe that if I had been allowed to use that weapon, they would not have shut down our banks. It was a technical issue, but effectively it concerned a small amount of debt that we owed to the ECB. If I was to restructure that debt, writing off part of it or even delaying repayment, it would have a knock-on effect.

I could have done this simply with an executive order from the ministry of finance — I had it on my desk; all I needed to do was to sign it. The ECB president Mario Draghi only had one thing on his mind: how to save Italy from falling into the same black hole by buying Italian public debt. For complicated reasons, he would not have been able to buy Italian public debt if I had been allowed to put my signature to that order.

That was my deterrence plan. I did essentially tell Draghi that if he shut down my banks, I was going to sign the document, and he wouldn’t be able to buy Italian debt. I believe that could have been enough to prevent that major move, which was effectively financial terrorism, to shut down our banks in order to blackmail the Greek people into accepting the third bailout.

The tragedy was that early on, I realized that my prime minister was very reluctant to let me do that. We had agreed on it as a condition for me accepting the Finance Ministry appointment, but he was preventing me from doing it. He was postponing action, saying, “We’ll do it next week.”

At some point, I discovered that two and a half months after I became finance minister, a message went from the office of Tsipras to Draghi’s team at the ECB: “Don’t worry about Varoufakis; we won’t let him do it.” This was a bit like sending David into the battlefield against Goliath having stolen his catapult.

I had a catapult — I thought it was a nuclear weapon — maybe it was a catapult, maybe it was a nuclear weapon. But it was stolen. I knew early on that it wasn’t looking good. We were elected in January. By June, the negotiations were not going anywhere, because why would they negotiate with us when our side was sending messages that we were not prepared to walk away and use our weaponry?

The reason why I didn’t resign was because I believed that as long as there was a 5 percent chance that the prime minister would come to his senses and fight on, I needed to be there to help him.

In addition, our people out there had no idea of what was going on behind the scenes. They were jubilant that at long last, there was a government fighting for them. If I had simply resigned out of the blue, it would have been a disaster for the morale of our people.

By June 20, it was clear that my prime minister was trying to surrender. But they wouldn’t let him, because they wanted to drag him through the mud. As you mentioned, you had the Labour Party minister telling the Sinn Féin people in the Irish parliament, “this is what happens when you vote for parties like Syriza.” Mariano Rajoy, the conservative prime minister of Spain, said to the Spanish people, “This is what you will get if you vote for Spain’s Syriza,” meaning Podemos.

At that point, they wouldn’t let him surrender. He had sidelined me, even though I was still the finance minister. I was there simply egging him on, “Come on, overcome your urge to surrender. Let’s keep fighting.” He called the referendum because he saw it as a way out.

He was convinced we would lose it, which was not so irrational of him when you think about it. In the first election of 2012, our party jumped from 4 percent to 17 percent of the vote. In 2015, we formed a government with 36 percent of the vote. Thirty-six percent is not a crushing majority — the majority were still voting against us.

Even though we had immense support during those five or six months of fighting with the troika, you have to remember that it shut down the banks so there would be five working days before the referendum on Sunday with people not able to access their own deposits. Tsipras was thinking that with every day of the banks being shut, we would be losing support, and all you need to do to lose a referendum is not get 51 percent.

From his perspective, he thought he was going to lose it. It wouldn’t have been such a great loss for him, because if he had scored 40 or 45 percent in favor of saying “no” to the troika, he would have pushed our percentage from 36 to 40 or 45 percent. He would have been able to claim this as a personal victory, while at the same time, he would have had a mandate to surrender to the troika, which he didn’t have before.

That is why, on the night of Sunday, July 5, he collapsed when that remarkable number lit up on our screens, with 61 percent saying “no” to the troika offer. I went to his office, and it was like a wake. He had black circles around his eyes. I went in there celebrating, and he was on the floor.

He said to me, “It’s time to surrender.” I said, “No, it’s exactly the opposite — people out there are celebrating — we have an ethical and political duty to fight on.” That’s how it happened.

To begin with, let me draw a parallel between a prison riot and what happened in 2015. When prisoners living under horrific circumstances in some godforsaken prison riot and take over the prison, they burn mattresses, the cameras arrive, and it’s all over the news. It’s a big issue.

But the moment the riot squad or the army comes in and crushes the rebellion, two days later, nobody mentions it. It doesn’t mean that the conditions in the prison have improved — maybe they’re worse. Sadly, this is too close for comfort as a metaphor for what happened to Greece.

Financiers around the world love Greece. It is their wet dream. I don’t believe they can have higher profit rates or rent extraction rates anywhere in the world than in Greece — that’s why they love it. When they talk about the “Greek success story,” and they clap Greek government ministers visiting Davos or the City of London or Wall Street, they have a very good reason for this.

Let me give you an example. We are a country of ten million people. As we speak, there are 1,100,000 dwellings being foreclosed by the vulture funds that have purchased the nonperforming loans of the families and small businesses that until now owned these pieces of real estate. We are talking about 1,100,000 apartments, houses, and small shops in a population of ten million.

A particular example concerns a person I know because I’ve worked on her case. My party MeRA25 has been trying to help with particular cases, not just hers. Her name is Maria. Maria purchased in 2008 an apartment worth €250,000. She put down €50,000 as a deposit and borrowed the remaining €200,000. She sold a plot of land and managed to repay much of her loan very quickly.

Out of the €200,000 that she had borrowed on a twenty-five-year-old mortgage, she repaid half of it, so she only owed €100,000. She was doing very well. Her business was doing okay.

But in 2011, everything collapsed because of the Great Depression that hit Greece. She lost her shop and her income, and now she had that €100,000 outstanding debt on her mortgage that she couldn’t repay. That €100,000 became €200,000 with interest and the penalties for delayed payments.

A vulture fund with its base in Ireland and its bank account in the Cayman Islands bought that €200,000 loan from the Greek bank that had issued it in the first place.  It paid €10,000 for it, so they paid €10,000 in order to be able to extract €200,000 from poor Maria. Now they are evicting her — they are putting that apartment on sale for something like €150,000.

She gets nothing, even though she’s already repaid €150,000 of the original €250,000. Meanwhile, they have paid €10,000, yet they will collect €150,000 — work out the profit rate. That money will leave the Greek circular flow of income and go to the Cayman Islands legally.

Why are the vulture funds celebrating Greece while the Greeks are suffering? This is not really a paradox when you look at it closely. To give a more complete macroeconomic picture, in terms of GDP, we have more or less the same national income today that we had in 2009. It dipped very badly, and now it has picked up again.

But we had huge inflation during that period, like everybody since 2022. We have the same number of euros today as in 2009, but their purchasing power is 40 percent below what it was. In addition to that, because of the troika’s interventions, there has been a big increase in VAT from 19 to 24 percent, as well as huge taxes on labor, housing — everything. The state is extracting twice as much in taxes as it was in 2009.

Real disposable income today is 44 percent below what it was in 2009. As well as that, the bailout agreement that I wouldn’t sign has committed Greece up until the year 2060 to have a primary surplus that is gigantic. About €15 billion comes out of the economy and goes to the troika every year. If you add to that our current account deficit of €25 billion, we are essentially borrowing €25 billion in order to make ends meet as a society.

What I have just described to you is, independently of your politics, a nonviable social economy. Twenty percent of the population is doing better than ever — the ones who are on the good side of the troika and in the pockets of the oligarchs. But 80 percent are not.

They are not up in arms so much as they are depressed. They are staying at home and licking their wounds. They are privatizing their nightmares and whatever hopes they have left. When they hear people outside of Greece celebrating the “Greek success story,” I go back to my metaphor about a prison riot that has been crushed. The conditions in the prison have gotten worse, but nobody is talking about it.

I have no doubt that the historians of the future will look at the inane handling of the inevitable euro crisis — inevitable because of the architecture of the euro — and the way that Greece was used as a guinea pig for the combination of harsh austerity for the many and money-printing for the bankers, and mark it down as the reason why Europe is about to enter (or has already entered) a possible century-long decline.

I remember having this conversation with Wolfgang Schäuble. When I was talking to these people, I was not simply an advocate for the Greek people. I was that, of course — that was what I was elected to do; that was my mandate. But I was speaking on behalf of Europe as a whole.

I was saying to them, “Look, we created the euro in a terrible way. The architecture was as if we had designed it in order to fail. It was clear from the very beginning. Think about it. We created a central bank for twenty countries. The central bank didn’t have a treasury, and there were twenty treasuries that didn’t have a central bank.”

It was like removing the shock absorbers from your car and driving it into a ditch. That was what we did. The crisis was an opportunity to reconfigure and improve the architecture of the euro. But austerity was a means to avoid doing that, instead using the money-printing capacity of the ECB to keep financial markets afloat. They printed €8 or €9 trillion to give to the financial markets while practicing austerity for the many.

What happens when you crush the spending power of the people and you give lots of money to big business? Big business collects this money — of course, it’s free money; why wouldn’t they take it? But they look outside the window of their skyscraper in Paris or Frankfurt, and all they see are impecunious masses.

They’re not going to invest, because the many out there can’t afford to buy high value-added goods. But they have this money that has been printed and given to them, so what do they do? They go to the stock exchange and they buy back their own shares.

Their share price goes through the roof, and their bonus is connected to their share price, so they are laughing all the way to the bank. They go and buy a new apartment, a new yacht, more Bitcoins, a work of art. Asset prices go up, while the many are still impecunious and there’s no investment.

After fifteen years of that, it’s the end of Europe. It is the reason why Germany is now deindustrializing. It is deindustrializing because it did not invest anything in the last fifteen years. The managing directors and the members of the board of directors were doing splendidly, but they were not investing.

While the Chinese were investing their heads off and Elon Musk was investing in Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, and so on, Europe had zero net productive investment for something like sixteen or seventeen years. That is preposterous. The result is that now, Europe is dying. If people ask — and they should ask — why it is that fascism is having a second or third wind, it is because this is what happens when you have something like 1929.

Our 1929 happened in 2008, and then you had governments (like the one I was in) of the radical left capitulating. You had social democrats imposing policies that were far worse than what Margaret Thatcher did in Britain in the name of social democracy in countries like Germany, France, Greece, and Italy. The only people who will benefit politically from that are the neofascists, the manosphere, the racists.

The story of Greece is not just about Greece. For some reason, this little country of mine has been at the beginning of major disasters. I don’t know what it is about this place, but if you think about it, the Cold War began here. It didn’t begin in Berlin — it began in the streets of Athens in December 1944. That was the first incident. The Truman Doctrine, which was the beginning of NATO and the Cold War, was written by President Harry Truman for Greece.

In 2009–10, we also started the euro crisis. This is why I think that the record of the Greek left — and I include the party I served in — is inexcusable. We brought the European left down with us because we had a chance to make a difference, having been the first country, the first domino. And we blew it.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’m not a commentator — I’m a participant. I lead MeRA25, our radical left-wing party in Greece at the moment, and I’m part of DiEM25.

This is important to note, because the reason why I’m part of this movement is because we reject gradualism. We reject the logic of the lesser evil — of having to choose between the center left and the center right. We reject both. We consider the center left to have been far more responsible for the rise of the Right and far more responsible for depleting the social fabric of Europe.

It was the center left, let me remind you, that invented austerity in the interest of the lesser-evil logic. It wasn’t Schäuble or the Christian Democrats in Germany — it was Peer Steinbrück of the Social Democrats who imposed austerity when he was the finance minister. Before that, it was Gerhard Schröder who introduced the Hartz IV reforms that crippled the working class in Germany.

It was PASOK here in Greece who introduced the first bailout. You cannot push the center left to do something that the powers that be — the financiers, the troika, the ECB — will not allow them to do. In the end, they don’t even want to do it themselves. They merely want to appear as if they are doing it.

When you are facing a systemic crisis as we have been since 2008, and the gradualism of the radical center — which involves both the center right and the center left — is the real source of energy and dynamism for the fascists, then the only thing you can do is to rise up against both, since they are Tweedledum and Tweedledee. In the EU today, you have Ursula von der Leyen, who is a warmongering, half-crazed, genocide-supporting president of the European Commission, with the support of the right-wing European People’s Party and the center-left Socialists and Democrats.

This is not a time to say, in the United States, for example, that Joe Biden is a little bit better than Donald Trump: “Maybe you should vote for the guy that armed the hand of Netanyahu to carry out the genocide.” No, we won’t. We have to fight both of them.