English

Yanis Varoufakis begins his account of his half year as Greece’s finance minister in the left populist Syriza government (Adults in the Room, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) with a description of a meeting with Larry Summers. According to Varoufakis, Summers explains that there are two types of politicians. There are those who are on the inside and play by the rules. They can just occasionally accomplish things by persuading others in the room to take their advice.

The Greek people are paying dearly for having been lulled into a false sense of security, writes former Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis. Germans, he says, are laboring under the same illusion today.
Complacency is a country’s worst enemy.  My compatriots were, once upon a time, lulled into a false sense of having “made it.” I very much fear that a majority of Germans feel their land is “doing fine.”

At Bozar (Brussels) the movement co-founded by former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis presented a critical account of the state of affairs in the European Union, which they fear at risk of disintegration, and their proposals to change it. “Europeans must set aside the propaganda coming from the Commission”.

OPINION

Yanis Varoufakis: Germany needs a frank debate
The Greek people are paying dearly for having been lulled into a false sense of security, writes former Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis. Germans, he says, are laboring under the same illusion today.

Britain must make a radical move if it is to avoid the snare set by Brussels, which wants Brexit to fail, writes Greece’s former finance minister
Yanis Varoufakis
September 10 2017, 12:01am, The Sunday Times
Varoufakis arrives at a meeting in Athens while he was the Greek finance ministerGETTY
Share

The weekend before the President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, delivers his official ‘State of the Union’ speech in Strasbourg, DiEM25 will be in Brussels, at the BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts, to open the lid on the real state of our European Union; and to discuss DiEM25′ plans for 2019 and beyond.

Featuring  former Ecuador President Rafael Correa, Jeff Sachs, Senator Alice-Mary Higgins, Philippe Legrain, Lorenzo Marsili, & Yanis Varoufakis, this two-hour event, in Brussels’ best theatre space (the Bozar) will address three questions:

“It’s yours against mine.” That’s how Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany’s finance minister, put it to me during our first encounter in early 2015 – referring to our respective democratic mandates.

I warned Jeremy Corbyn about Brexit – now Labour must regain its radicalism

ATHENS – Western capitalism has few sacred cows left. It is time to question one of them: the independence of central banks from elected governments.

The news that “documenta 14 Cancels ‘Auschwitz on the Beach’ Performance Amid Intense Criticism” should worry us all. Censorship is the coward’s way out of controversy. Dialogue, fierce disagreement and, hopefully eventual synthesis, is the hard road that democrats dare to tread.