An Interview with Yanis Varoufakis

The last few years have been a bit of a rollercoaster for the European left. Riding up front has been Yanis Varoufakis, the charismatic economist and former Greek finance minister who went to war with the troika - the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund- in 2015 as it sought to inflict brutal austerity as a penalty for his country's debts and its decision to elect an openly left-wing government headed by Syriza. They lost that fight, but Varoufakis escaped mostly unscated. Amid Brexit and a wave of Euroskepticism, he went on to found the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25), pushing for a more democratic and inclusive continent, free of austerity. Ther group mounted several candidates under the mantle of a European Spring this May, including Varoufakis himself. They failed to gain a single seat, though his vote total came in a hundreth of a percentage point below the 3 percent threshold needed to gain representation. While the center-right faltered in May, so, too, did the left.