As the Syriza Party took the helm of the Greek government in earnest on Tuesday, the Guardian newspaper described its selection of top cabinet ministers, announced by the new Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, as “a formidable coterie of academics, human rights advocates, mavericks and visionaries.”
Among the most discussed appointments to the more than 40-member cabinet was that of Yanis Varoufakis as Finance Minister. As both university professor and an outspoken public critic of the austerity-laden bailout program imposed from abroad, Varoufakis has been unrelenting in his insistence that painful cuts to social spending, tax avoidance by the rich, the privatization of key industries, and enormous debt payments should be supplanted by a new economic paradigm that will put the Greek people ahead of foreign creditors and elite interests.
Known for writing a daily blog and an influential Twitter feed which have both chronicled his critique of the Troika’s assault on Greece, Varoufakis indicated on Tuesday that the leaders of the IMF, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission should not expect any erosions to his positions just because he will now be the chief negotiator with whom they must deal when it comes to debt restructuring and possible reforms to the bailout terms.
“The time to put up or shut up has, I have been told, arrived,” he wrote on his blog early on Tuesday, just as the news broke regarding his new position in the government. “My plan is to defy such advice. To continue blogging here even though it is normally considered irresponsible for a Finance Minister to indulge in such crass forms of communication.”
Meanwhile, in the international press, Varoufakis has been poked and prodded by the business pages—including Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, and others—over recent days in order to see what the man who once said the Eurozone was “like the Hotel California” and characterized austerity as “fiscal waterboarding” would do now that he’s been given the keys to the Greek economy.
According to a profile in the Guardian:
In an interview with Channel 4‘s Paul Mason news just ahead of Sunday’s elections, Varoufakis pledged that with Syriza in power—which they come to “reluctantly” and only in the name of public service, he said—the overall aim of their economic plan would be “to destroy the Greek oligarchy system” that played an outsized role in creating the current crisis.
“We are going to destroy,” he said of the nation’s wealthy elite, “the basis upon which they have built for decade after decade a system, a network that viciously sucks the energy and the economic power from everybody else in society.”
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