Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’ feisty and media-savvy Finance Minister, continues to generate heavy-duty media attention not only for his radical and candid positions seeking a much better deal for debt and recession-bombed Greece — but also, for his fashion choices.
In an interview with Helena Smith, the Guardian’s long-time correspondent for Greece, Turkey and Cyprus, the self-described “libertarian communist” economist spoke openly about a number of issues, including his new and untested government’s strategy in view of a critical Eurogroup meeting on Monday. The world’s newest “celebrity economist” and an occasional US and Australia resident also answers questions on media reactions to his style and … Marxist ideology.
With regard to rave reviews in the international press about his non-conformist stylistic choices and the fact that he has been compared to comic-book and mythical heroes, likened to a rock star, hailed as a sex icon and feted by fashionistas, Varoufakis told the Guardian that he doesn’t plan or promote this image.
“They go on about me riding a motorbike, but I have been riding a bike since I was 15. I just am who I am,” the FinMin said.
The journalist describes Varoufakis as a “muscular, fit and amiable” man full of “energy, focus and intensity.”
“An hour in his company will take you places; in our case, from Marxist theory to the joys of jazz; the eurozone and its incomplete architecture; sartorial tastes; Nazism; the bigness of America; austerity politics; debt traps; poetry; exercise and Varoufakis’ tendency to keep his hands in his pockets,” Smith writes.
Asked to elaborate on his Marxist views, he replies: “I was told, once, by a left-wing scholar that as a Marxist you have to do two things: always be optimistic and always have a view about everything. That advice still sounds good to me.”
The 53-year-old Varoufakis claims that he “understands the world better” as a result of having read Marx. However, he no longer considers himself a “diehard leftie.”
“I don’t think you can understand capitalism until and unless you understand those contradictions and ask yourself if capitalism is the natural state. I don’t think it is. That’s why I am a left-winger,” Yanis, whose taught in very “un-Marxist” Texas and consulted for a gaming software firm near Seattle, opined.
He also pointed out during the interview that the bailout in 2010 was “not a bailout of Greece, it was a bailout of the German and French banks.”
Moreover, when asked whether he has a “plan B”, in the context of the country’s negotiations with its creditors, he gave the following — refreshingly honest but at the same time ominous — reply: “We constantly hear, ‘if you don’t sign on the dotted line there is going to be Armageddon’. My answer is ‘let it happen!’ There is no fall-back plan. That is my plan B.”
