Do we like Yanis Varoufakis?
Our score: 7 out of 10. A decent record on the right side of the harm test, with contested positions and a thin LGBTQ+ paper trail.
Varoufakis is the motorbike-riding economist who became the face of Greece's fight with its creditors. He was finance minister in 2015 under Alexis Tsipras, opposed the troika's austerity demands, and left the government after the referendum against the third bailout's conditions. Since then he has led MeRA25, the Greek branch of the pan-European DiEM25 movement he co-founded.
The story of the moment is a ripper of a pointless fight. In a January podcast he said he took ecstasy once, in Sydney in 1989, and police sent the video to the Athens prosecutor. In February he was charged over it, and he is due in court in December. Health minister Adonis Georgiadis said the comments were irresponsible and urged an apology, while Varoufakis called it a “ridiculous prosecution” and MeRA25 said it is an attack on free speech.
The other big stoush is Germany. In April 2024 its interior ministry banned him from entering the country and from political activity there, after police shut down a Palestine Congress in Berlin that he was due to address. German authorities labelled the gathering antisemitic. He rejects that, took the German state to court in 2024, and says he wants to know who accuses him and why. The Greek Herald's report on his lawsuit carried no ruling.
On the harm test, we found nothing from him demeaning LGBTQ+ people, women or migrants, and DiEM25 has hosted a trans-rights event that listed him on the team, though we found no direct statement of his own. That is thin, and we say so. His Gaza and Israel positions are the contested bit: where you land depends on whether you read the Berlin congress as a platform for Palestinian voices or, as German authorities put it, something else.
Politically he is plotting a comeback. MeRA25 lost its seats in Greece's 2023 election and won 2.54 per cent in the 2024 European elections. Greece must hold an election before July 2027 and he is preparing to win seats back, while still writing, lecturing and debating.
Not everyone is a fan. Tsipras's memoirs reportedly say he acted “like a celebrity selfish”, which fits the picture of a brilliant, abrasive operator who is hard to work with. The flip side is that he walked away from a ministry over principle and kept campaigning, and a prosecution for a decades-old drug anecdote makes him look like the underdog here.