Yanis Varoufakis brands Alexis Tsipras the ‘new De Gaulle’ as election gets ugly

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Greece’s pre-election campaign has turned ugly before it has even officially commenced, with senior figures – including the former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis – rounding on the prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, for his governance of the crisis-plagued country.

Breaking the wary truce since his surprise resignation the day after Greeks voted to reject austerity in a referendum last month, Varoufakis has lashed out at the leftwing leader’s policy choices, saying in an interview in the New Review that Tsipras had decided “to surrender” to the punitive demands of international creditors keeping Athens afloat. Instead of remaining faithful to the anti-austerity platform on which his radical left Syriza party had been elected, the young prime minister had allowed his ego to get the better of him and made a conscious decision to become the “new De Gaulle, or Mitterrand more likely”.

In the wake of Tsipras’s unexpected move on Thursday to call early elections, Varoufakis said: “Tsipras made a decision on that night of the referendum not only to surrender to the troika but also to implement the terms of surrender on the basis that it is better that a progressive government implement terms of surrender that it despises than leave it to the local stooges of the troika, who would implement the same terms of surrender with enthusiasm.”

As a result, Syriza once the hope of Europe’s anti-austerity movement, had not only betrayed the cause but mutated into the very thing it had set out not to be. “This mutation I have already witnessed. Those in our party/government who underwent it, then turned against those who refused to mutate, the result being a split in the party that our people, the courageous voters who voted No, did not deserve,” he wrote.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/22/varoufakis-brands-alexis-tsipras-new-de-gaulle

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1. De Gaulle was the resistance

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2. Yanis Varoufakis: ‘If I’m convicted of high treason, it would be interesting’

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As a chorus of cicadas fill the warm scented air, I remind Varoufakis that the situation in Greece is now worse than when he was appointed minister at the beginning of the year. At the end of 2014, the Greek economy was judged to be growing and since Syriza’s victory it had gone into sharp reverse. Does he feel any responsibility for that predicament?

He presses his fingers together, as if momentarily in prayer, and says in his perfectly precise English: “At the risk of sounding arrogant, absolutely not. The reason is very simple.”

He explains in a series of declarative sentences, constructed with faultless logic, that in 2010 Greece went “spectacularly” bankrupt and Europe has consistently refused to confront this reality because the monetary union was never designed to deal with such an eventuality. All sorts of places can effectively go bankrupt – the north of England, for example, he says – but as long as there are the surplus-recycling mechanisms of a unitary state, then the situation can be remedied. But Europe has no such provision for default.

“And what do you do when there is no provision for default?” he asks in the rhetorical style of an economics lecturer. “You behave like truly scandalous bankers. They extend a loan that has turned bad and pretend that it is not bad and give good money after bad money. So the largest loan ever in history, in absolute not relative terms, was given to the most insolvent state in the eurozone.”

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/23/yanis-varoufakis-convicted-high-treason-interview-greece-finance-minister-syriza

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3. The Greek Debacle

On the crisis in Greece and Syriza’s failure to resist the eurozone

The Greek crisis has provoked a predictable mixture of indignation and self-satisfaction in Europe, alternatively lamenting the harshness of the settlement imposed on Athens or celebrating the last-minute retention of Greece within the European family, or both at once. Each is as futile as the other. A realistic analysis has no place for either.

That Germany is once again the hegemonic power in the continent is no news in 2015: it has been clear for at least twenty years. Nor is the reduction of France to its handmaid, in a relationship not unlike that of Britain to the United States, a political novelty: since de Gaulle, the reflexes of the French political class have reverted to those of the early forties, not only in accommodation, but admiration for the superior power of the day, first Washington and then Berlin.

Least of all is there any surprise in the outcome to date of monetary union. From the start, the economic benefits of European integration — taken for granted by bien-pensant opinion across the board — were very modest.

In 2008 the most careful estimate, from two economists favorable to integration, Barry Eichengreen and Andrea Boltho, concluded that it may have increased the GDP of the Common Market by 3–4 percent from the late fifties to the mid-seventies; that the impact of the European Monetary System was nugatory; that the Single European Act may have added another 1 percent; and that monetary union had scarcely any discernible effect on either rate of growth or level of output.

https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/the-greek-debacle