Yanis Varoufakis
I hope you will forgive me if I correct a basic misunderstanding that is embedded in the question in a way that is totally understandable. This is not how I saw or experienced things. I didn’t see the referendum as a way of continuing the fight.
Sadly, Alexis Tsipras called the referendum not to win it but to lose it. He had already capitulated.
Sadly, my former comrade Alexis Tsipras called the referendum not to win it but to lose it. He had already capitulated, and I was already on the way out while maintaining my position in the finance ministry.
In order to explain what happened with the referendum and how we got to the third bailout program, which wrecked the Left and wrecked the Greek people and rendered Greece a nonviable social economy, I need to start right at the beginning. As I said earlier, Greece was in a debtors’ prison, unless our debt was substantially written off or manipulated in such a way as to be the equivalent of a write-off.
There are very innovative ways of disguising a write-off — debt swaps and this and that. This is what I was proposing to them as a face-saving exercise for the Troika. If you are going to do that, the only way you’re going to be able to do that is if you are ready to walk away. You have to be prepared to imagine exiting the negotiating room and saying, “Folks, there’s an impasse. I’m going to go my own way.”
What does going your own way mean? It means printing your own currency and defaulting on your debt in euros, because if you don’t have the euro, you cannot repay your huge debt in euros, and you suffer the consequences for that, but you regain your autonomy and monetary sovereignty, and you try to start afresh. Unless you’re prepared to do that, there’s no point in entering the negotiating room.
This is what I had said to my colleagues. Of course, it’s not just a…
Auteur: Yanis Varoufakis
