Yanis Varoufakis knows when he will go. "I'm not going to humiliate myself, and I'm not going to become compromised in terms of principles and in terms of logic," he told me in early May. The Greek finance minister had just returned to Athens from a hopscotch tour of European capitals, during which he warned his fellow European leaders that they faced a Continental crisis: If they didn't lend money to his ailing country soon, Greece might end up forced to leave the eurozone. And yet Greece wouldn't accept many of the conditions they were demanding in return. He sounded angry. "I'll be damned if I will accept another package of economic policies that perpetuate this same crisis. This is not what I was elected for."
Varoufakis has been Greece's finance minister for only four months, but the story of how he has thrown Europe into turmoil is one many years in the making. After Greece joined the European Union's monetary union in 2001, the tiny country of 10 million was flooded with money from elsewhere on the Continent. Over the course of the next decade, Greek leaders, whose sclerotic and corrupt economy had long been rife with patronage and tax evasion, borrowed billions from imprudent European banks and then lied to EU officials about its mounting debts. When the financial crisis finally rolled into Greece in 2009, the country was an estimated $430 billion in debt. The European Commission, International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank agreed to bail out the sinking economy by loaning it $146 billion. In return, as Athenians rioted in the streets in protest.
That bailout, along with another, even larger rescue in 2012, temporarily buoyed Greece, but the spending cuts have produced what many Greeks consider to be a humanitarian crisis.
In January, more than a third of the electorate voted into power the Coalition of the Radical Left, a collection of older leftist parties now known as Syriza, which pledged to end austerity. The rise of a "radical" party in the region has frightened conservative and centrist European leaders facing anger at home.
During the campaign, Syriza promised its voters a range of seeming impossibilities that ran counter to the political realities inside the eurozone. At the same time, Syriza was now vowing to remain in the euro. To negotiate an agreement that might accomplish this seemingly impossible outcome, Tsipras decided to send a pugnacious economist named Yanis Varoufakis.
It was a startling choice. Varoufakis is neither a politician nor a banker by training. He has been one of the most visible and vociferous critics of the Greek government and the European establishment. His popularity was undeniable, though.
Four months into his political tenure, Varoufakis is at the center of a contest that could determine the entire Continent's future. No deal between Greece and the domineering center of European authority has been reached. Varoufakis finds himself struggling to hold on to his principles, what he calls the "red lines" that prevent him, in his mind, from becoming like every other politician before him.
"For the people who are now 15, 16, 17 years old, to have a chance by the time they are 20 - this is what matters," he told me. "There's no doubt that this economy now is far worse off in the last two months as a result of our hard bargaining."
Only someone who lives in Greece can look at a busy restaurant and tell you that a souvlaki and soda costs only $5; that the college graduate sits outside for hours because he is unemployed and has no future; that the elderly man sitting with him lost his pension and has been nursing that same beer all day.
The finance ministry itself was deserted when I visited Varoufakis in February. His office had been set up for a news crew, and wires and gadgets crisscrossed the floor. During his recent tour through European capitals, Varoufakis stunned Europeans and Greeks with his reflexive defiance. Greece, he said, would no longer simply acquiesce to the austerity doctrine of the European Commission and the IMF. In fact, Varoufakis, who believes Greece should have been treated as a bankruptcy case, initially wanted the institutions to write off a portion of its debt, which amounted to some $262 billion.
The Europeans eyed Varoufakis as if his species had never swum in their lagoon. They dwelled on his black leather jacket, his popped collar, the colors of his shirts, his shaved head. He was apparently a sex symbol, too. He rode a motorcycle. He worked out; he had charisma and cheekbones. Some German comedians even made a video that depicted Varoufakis as a man of animalistic power, some sort of rock star who licks his motorcycle seat in one scene. At home, "V Is for Varoufakis" posters hung in the windows of cafes. Greeks showered him with love, twittered over his looks, and wrote adoring satires of his glamorous life and wide-ranging talents. Varoufakis is outspoken, passionate and confident about his ideas. That, apparently, was the problem, because Varoufakis did not go to Europe merely to negotiate Greece's future. He wanted to show the Europeans how to save Europe itself.
Varoufakis says he took the job because, after years of articulating a solution to the crisis, he said he felt he didn't have a choice. "In the 1980s, I was incensed by apartheid. Some people could forget about it; I couldn't forget about it. It's not because I am morally superior, I just couldn't forget about it. Similarly, in the case of the 2008 crisis, it was the idiocy of it: This was a crisis that was unnecessary."
Varoufakis left England in 1988 to teach at the University of Sydney, where he began a series of conversations about the global economy with the economist Joseph Halevi, the two of them among academics in their field who contested the notion then popular that the world had entered a new phase of "perpetual growth," what the former Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke called the "great moderation." After the crash, Varoufakis decided to put those ideas into a book for a popular audience titled, "The Global Minotaur," which presented the world, and Europe, as perilously yoked to the fluctuations of the American economy. When the crisis finally reached Greece, Varoufakis began working with the British economist Stuart Holland and, later, the American economist James Galbraith, on a pamphlet titled, "A Modest Proposal," which identified four major crises in Europe - in banking, public debt, underinvestment and social welfare - and proposed solutions to each. "Europe is fragmenting," they wrote. "As this happens, human costs mount, and disintegration becomes an increasing threat."
But when he sought to make his case in interviews and speeches across Europe these past months as finance minister, while also mounting a moral argument for easing the suffering of Greece as well as other southern European countries, his European counterparts were exasperated. They were frightened, too, by the prospect of Varoufakis serving as inspiration for leftist movements elsewhere - especially in Spain.
Syriza's opponents in Greece wonder if Tsipras and Varoufakis have already failed. They were naïve, the critics contend, to believe that they could extract concessions from the Europeans.
In April, newspapers reported that Varoufakis had been "sidelined" from the negotiations after finance ministers angrily insulted him at a meeting in Riga - reportedly calling him a gambler, an amateur and a time-waster. Varoufakis denied any such report, but said, he and the prime minister decided that they should reshuffle the teams to adjust to the narrative that dominated the media.
©2015 The New York Times News Service
