Greece in 2015 :
A questionable account by Varoufakis of the origins of the Greek crisis
by Eric Toussaint
In the previous article entitled ‘Greece 2015: Varoufakis’ proposals were doomed to fail’, I critically analysed the proposals made by Varoufakis before joining Tsipras’ government in January 2015, showing that they led to failure. This article covers the ties Varoufakis maintained with Greece’s ruling political class (both the Pasok, historically linked to social-democracy, and the conservative New Democracy) for several years.
On several occasions, Varoufakis mentions the broad range of his relations with members of the Greek political milieu. He stresses his past friendship with Yanis Stournaras (the current governor of the Bank of Greece, an ally of Mario Draghi and of the private Greek and foreign bankers), his good relations in 2009 with George Papandreou (who implemented the policies leading to the first Memorandum of Understanding in May 2010) and his relationship with Antonis Samaras (who led the Greek government after the second Memorandum of Understanding), and he devotes a large part of the first four chapters of his book to relating how a close collaboration, and at times a complicity, was formed with three Syriza leaders. Those leaders were Alexis Tsipras (who led the Greek people into the third Memorandum of Understanding) and Nikos Pappas (Tsipras’s alter ego, who became a minister of state in the first Tsipras government), who were joined later by Yannis Dragasakis (before he became vice–prime minister of the first and second Tsipras governments). In this second chapter I will deal with Varoufakis’s account of the start of the crisis in Greece and his relations with Greece’s traditional political class.