Campaigning

Leaking the Guilty Secrets of Power is not a Phrase, it is a Sentence. And no one is facing a longer one today than JA.

Julian has GAINED the right to quote another past prisoner, another enemy of Empire, Mahatma Ghandi. Like Ghandi Julian could say: “You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind.”

He may very well say that.

But WE don’t have the right to agree.

We must NOT let THEM destroy his body.

WE must END his torture.

During 2015’s first half, as Greece’s finance minister, I participated in thirteen crucial Eurogroup meetings – before the SYRIZA government (disrespecting the referendum result of 5th July) capitulated. The result of that capitulation was my immediate resignation and a permanent austerity program (until… 2060). 

There is a fork in the road. A mighty choice is coming. We can have a plan. An imperfect plan maybe. But one for the planet, not the corporations. For the many, not the few. A plan for the ‘we’, not the ‘I’.

It is with profound regret, and after much reflection, that I am pulling out as a speaker at an interesting and worthy international conference organised by TRT World in Istanbul on 21st October. I do so in protest of the Turkish armed forces’ invasion of Northern Syria.

This morning, in Greece’s Parliament, MeRA25’s parliamentarians are staging an all-out struggle against the ratification of disastrous contracts between the previous (SYRIZA) government and multinational oil companies.

“We showed Europeans how a common agenda can be put together collaboratively by many political actors coalescing from all over Europe. How a common list of candidates, in support of this common agenda, can emerge. How we can campaign across Europe, together, under the banner of this agenda. In the months and weeks leading to 26th May, I have had the distinct privilege of campaigning with all of you in Paris, in Brussels, across Italy and the UK, in Denmark, in Portugal and, of course, in Greece and in Germany.

Nothing has ever been subtle with Yanis Varoufakis, the leather-jacketed, motorbike-riding economist who was finance minister of Greece for six of the most tumultuous months in that country’s history. Plain-spoken (to say the least) and a self-professed radical, he is, at 58, not nearly done waging war on Europe’s major power players.