When Yanis Varoufakis launched the “Democracy in Europe Movement 2025”, or DiEM25, two years ago, he said Europe’s democratic deficit needed to be tackled as a continental problem.
His six-month tenure as Greece‘s finance minister the previous year had convinced him that national governments lacked either the willpower or the clout to change Europe.
“The sovereignty of national parliaments has been dissolved by the eurozone and the Eurogroup,” he said at the time, referring – respectively – to the European Union’s monetary union and the body where its finance minister meet.
On Monday, Varoufakis announced that he is founding a Greek political party: MeRA25.
This is in keeping with his promise to bring his transnational movement down to the national level in due course, where elections take place.
His goal is to mount a pan-European movement by 2025 that will overturn the European establishment which, in his words, “is becoming ever more toxic, class-oriented, powerless and discredited.”
He still draws energy and bile from those formative months in office, when Greece’s government led by the Syriza, a left-wing party, went up against the country’s creditors in the eurozone and lost.
Varoufakis broke ranks with Syriza in July 2015, after the party capitulated to a third bailout loan with more austerity terms attached.
“What wounded the dream of 2015 was not so much the third memorandum,” he says, using Greek shorthand for the bailout loan.
“It was the sight of its implementation by Syriza – the vision of the left implementing austerity in the name of overcoming it.
“Hearing [current Finance Minister] Euclid Tsakalotos saying that austerity will be chased away by the prosperity austerity will bring is unbearable.”
DiEM25 vision
DiEM25 has fielded Benoit Hamon, the recent socialist presidential candidate in France, and author Lorenzo Marsili in Italy.
The starting gun for a pan-European election went off last year, when French President Emmanuel Macron suggested using the 73 European Parliament seats vacated by British MEPs to launch a new category of transnational MEPs, who will be elected in several EU member states at once.
The EU could thus seek to reclaim its legitimacy as a democratic institution, but it is also an opportunity for the Eurofederalist Varoufakis, who watched the eurozone emasculate the Greek parliament in 2015.
“We watched government MPs vote for measures they say they disagree with, and opposition MPs vote against them saying they will implement them when they come to power,” Varoufakis told the 600-odd people gathered in a theatre in central Athens.
“That’s a comedy farce. But do you know what we’ll do? Even as they convert our parliament into a comedy farce, we shall convert theatres such as this into parliaments,” he said to thunderous applause.
“You cannot have a common coinage without a common foreign and defence policy,” said author Vasilis Vasilikos, a member of DiEM25, reflecting Greece’s current concerns in the Aegean Sea.
“That’s how, ‘Europe’ lost two letters and became just ‘euro’,” he told Al Jazeera. “In 2025, our movement will bear fruit and solve the problem of Europe which is not Greek, but eminently European.”
