Yanis Varoufakis: It was one big coup d’ etat championed by Eurogroup where only a psychopath can thrive!

“If you’re a psychopath and you thrive on conflict, then the Eurogroup is the place to be.”

Former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis never wastes a moment when it comes to antagonizing. In an interview published in Thursday’s edition of Dutch newspaper De Wolkskrant he took swints at those who vilified him and his negotiation tactics.

He said that only a psychopath could thrive at Eurogroup, whereas he described German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble as a puppet master. As for Eurogroup President Jeroen Dijsselbloem – he is nothing but an ineffectual tool of the Germans.

Regarding the agreement that EU partners reached with Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, Varoufakis states that it was “one big coup d’ etat”,  and one which he will not take responsibility for. “My speeches were moderate, my plans measured, my advisors were not left-wing lunatics. There was another reason that the other side poured poison and lies over me, and portrayed me as a dangerous radical while I was the most right wing minister in the cabinet. If I was a crazy left-wing lunatic, they wouldn’t have been afraid of me,” he says, adding that they wanted to get rid of him because he knew what he was talking about.

At Eurogroup, Varoufakis said that Schaeuble dominated the meetings and he is the one who pulled all the strings with the other ministers being marionettes. “He decides who becomes the president, he determines the agenda, he controls everything,” says Varoufakis.

As for Dijsselbloem, Varoufakis describes him as a man with no real power or authority. “He is a soldier, a puppet,” says Varoufakis. “He can’t make any decisions without calling Schäuble.” Later in the interview he calls Dijsselbloem a “cog in a machine that he doesn’t understand himself.” Varoufakis found that he had no reason to speak to Dijsselbloem because he was “neither willing nor able to have a real discussion let alone be interested.”

The Eurogroup is described as a place for power-hungry politicians where almost no one has power and everyone cancels each other out. “If you’re a psychopath and you thrive on conflict, then the Eurogroup is the place to be.”

The reason he recorded the meetings was because they lasted so long that he could barely remember exactly what had been discussed and what happened. “Everything took place in a big haze,” he said.

What was his biggest regret? His biggest regret was to wrongly blindly trust Tsipras. He said that he trusted in the unity of the Greek government. “Tsipras surrendered to the demands of the Eurogroup – without consulting me,” he said.

Who gets praise? European Central Bank Chief Mario Draghi gets praise as being a “formidable economist” who is nonetheless “frustrated by the suffocating limitations of his ECB mandate.”