‘Gambler’, ‘amateur’, ‘time-waster’ and now ‘alone at almost every turn’, ‘isolated’, disrespectful of other ministers and unwilling to represent his country. It was almost precisely as that friendly official at the US Treasury had warned me: that I would face a character assassination campaign within a week. He was out by only one day.
Of course it was the worst-kept secret in Brussels and beyond that I was to be targeted in this way. In early February 2015, around the time of my first two Eurogroup meetings, some Greek journalists were told as much by a reporter with first-hand knowledge of the campaign. One of those Greek journalists later reported the conversation.
‘Will Mr Varoufakis be able to survive the pressure?’ asked the reporter.
‘At least Mr Tsipras still trusts him,’ we [the Greek journalists] replied.
‘Then inform them in Greece, both the government and the people, that they can expect even more of these attacks,’ he said.13
The bond of trust between Alexis and me was the troika’s greatest obstacle. I knew it. Evidently they knew it too. And as I was about to discover, Alexis knew it also.
The jumper’s thread
On the flight from Riga back to Athens I was informed that Alexis’s conversation with Angela Merkel, on which he had pinned so much, had gone badly. To make things worse, the Chancellery had leaked to the media that the German leader not only gave Alexis the cold shoulder but that she was unhappy with his attempt to bypass the Eurogroup. It was an extraordinary if unsurprising act of bad faith. Having promised Alexis that the two of them would find a solution behind the scenes while Varoufakis and Schäuble cancelled each other out, she was now hanging him out to dry.
Arriving at Athens airport I asked to be driven directly to Maximos. Once in Alexis’s office I realized what a beautiful spring afternoon it was. Attica’s gentle sunlight streamed through the large bay window. Alexis and I hugged and sat down in two armchairs by the bay window, away from his desk and from the conference table where the war cabinet met, directly in the sunlight. I spoke first, describing what had happened in the Eurogroup, and gave my opinion that the three major developments – Merkel reneging on him, the troika’s ambush at Riga and Benoît’s pressure that we request the capital controls with which they were threatening us – were combining to form a formidable onslaught.14
Before Alexis had a chance to respond, I spoke to him from the heart: ‘Alexi, allow me to remind you why I am here. I did not leave my job in Texas because I wanted to be minister. I came over to help you personally. And I did this because you told me you agreed with my plan for ending the doom loop. But now we are at a crossroads. I have attracted the creditors’ arrows, bullets and missiles. I do not mind this at all as I fully expected to be the lightning rod that shields you. However, you seem to have developed different ideas to the ones we agreed on. Maybe I am now in your way. Maybe you feel that another finance minister would suit your plans better, given that I still think our original plan offers the only chance. If so, you should replace me with my full public support. Remember why I am here? To help you.’
Alexis gave me a long warm comradely look and, after a pause, said, ‘Yani, listen. You and I are like a woollen jumper. If we let them get hold of a thread and start pulling it, eventually the jumper will be undone. This is their strategy. They are aiming at your undoing to undo me. They want to get you to get at me. We are not going to let them, right? We are going to stand together. I do not want to hear again about this nonsense. Stay strong. We have a war to win.’
Once more it took only a few words from Alexis to make me forget and forgive. Combined with my deep desire to believe what he said and the genuine opportunity we had to extract our country from its vicious cycle, they revived my hopes and steeled my nerves.
A few minutes later that sense of purpose received another boost when Nikos Pappas walked in. He smiled widely upon seeing me and congratulated me for having stood up to the troika in Riga, briefly reviving the spirit of our earlier meetings in Psyrri. Pappas had some news: apparently, Jeroen Dijsselbloem had just emailed Alexis’s office to demand that I be replaced.
‘See?’ Alexis said, looking at me. ‘They’re at it! Trying to divide us.’ Turning to Pappas, he said, ‘Niko, tell him to go jump off a cliff.’
But Pappas responded aggressively: ‘It is all your fault, Alexi,’ he said, adding a number of adjectives that I would rather not repeat. ‘By talking to him directly, instead of referring him to Yanis, you gave Jeroen the impression that he can have direct access to the prime minister and bypass the finance minister that stands up to him. You have no one to blame but yourself,’ he concluded at the top of his voice.
Alexis acknowledged his ‘mistake’ and said, ‘I shall email him tonight, making it clear that anything he wants to say to us he must say via Varoufakis.’
That night I went home feeling hopeful again. ‘The jumper seems intact,’ I told Danae cryptically before explaining myself.
The following day, after a meeting of the war cabinet, I asked Alexis whether he had sent the email to Jeroen. ‘No, I decided not to, Yani,’ he said. ‘Why antagonize him needlessly? Let him find out the hard way that he will have to deal with you.’ Alarmed at this decision, I nevertheless failed to recognize the bitter truth: the jumper was already unravelling.
The cruellest April day
‘April is the cruellest month,’ wrote T.S. Eliot in the opening of The Waste Land. In the April of 2015, Monday 27 was its cruellest day. Our war cabinet lasted six hours and fifteen minutes. It began with Alexis announcing his decision to give the troika something as an expression of goodwill. That ‘something’ was the head of my deputy, Nicholas Theocarakis, the man who, on the orders of our prime minister, had put the phone down on Thomas Wieser and the Eurogroup Working Group.
Alexis sounded almost reasonable when he explained his decision. ‘I talked to Dijsselbloem twice. He demanded Varoufakis’s head. He also wanted Chouliarakis to represent us at the Eurogroup Working Group. I can’t let him choose for us, but at the same time we cannot say no to everything. So I decided to burn Theocarakis and restore Chouliarakis.’
Spyros Sagias, the cabinet secretary, was first to respond. He spoke of a ‘faulty negotiation’, that we had been pursuing the ‘wrong process’, of the need to wrap up a deal quickly. It was a drawn-out speech delivered with low intensity, in which I was not mentioned by name but which laid the blame clearly at my door. George Stathakis, the economy minister and a long-standing academic colleague of mine, went further: ‘The duo Varoufakis–Theocarakis, I love them both as brothers, but they cannot bring home an agreement. Chouliarakis can.’
If by ‘agreement’ he meant capitulation to Wieser and Dijsselbloem’s demands, then Stathakis was perfectly correct. Chouliarakis was the right man to sign a surrender document. I intervened to say so. My brief statement was greeted with an awkward silence.
Then Euclid took the floor. Surely he would oppose the developing coup? He didn’t. Instead, without mentioning either Chouliarakis or me, he pronounced Theocarakis a fine scholar, thinker and comrade but not someone with the organizational skills necessary for such complex negotiations. By implication, he was endorsing Chouliarakis’s return.
I never felt the slightest animosity towards Stathakis. His views had been clear from the beginning: we should accept whatever the troika presented us with. It was those of my comrades who had pledged never to surrender who disappointed me bitterly. Euclid’s position saddened me immensely. He knew who Chouliarakis was and what he had done. He had talked to me about him in language more scathing than I would ever have used. Why was Euclid now tearing strips off our friend Theocarakis in support of Alexis’s horrendous proposition? Why did he not at least stay silent like Pappas, who had swallowed his bravado of two days before, or even Dragasakis, who was no doubt happy at the decision but felt no need to say a single word? The answer arrived minutes later when Alexis announced that Euclid would coordinate the negotiations of the Brussels Group with the technical process in Athens and my struggles at the Eurogroup.
During the remainder of that long, long meeting I kept uncharacteristically silent while the rest plotted a course of complete alignment with the MoU process, in stark contrast to the plan that I had brought back from Washington. The reason for my silence was that in my head I was scripting a new resignation letter. The end of the road had arrived. There was no place for me in a cabinet that had wittingly or unwittingly surrendered.
Like blood to a shark
Later that day I visited Alexis at his parliamentary office with my resignation letter in my pocket. I had not spoken to a single person about it, not even to Danae. I wanted to give Alexis one more chance to reconsider, and I would not be satisfied this time with rousing words that masked the unpleasant truth. Thankfully, there were none.
When I arrived, Alexis welcomed me in but asked me to wait for a minute while he went to the bathroom. As I was sitting down on the couch to await his return, I caught sight of a few A4 pages on the adjacent coffee table. I picked them up. When Alexis emerged, my expression no doubt conveyed my indignation at what I had read.
With the pages in my hand, I asked, ‘Am I right in presuming that you didn’t run these concessions by me because you knew I would veto them?’
‘Yes,’ he confessed with a guilty smile.
‘Do you understand what these numbers are, Alexi? Do you realize what you have done by conceding them? Don’t you get it that you have just accepted huge new austerity?’
The main number I had in mind – which had snagged my attention like a rusty nail – was 3.5. The pages were a letter signed by the Greek prime minister and addressed to the troika, committing to a budget with a primary surplus target of 3.5 per cent of national income. Unbelievably, the same number appeared next to the years 2018, 2019 … all the way to 2028. With the exceptions of Singapore and oil-rich Norway, no country in the world has ever posted a 3.5 per cent budget primary surplus for ten years in succession. The chance that a depressed economy lacking functional banks and with negative investment could do so was the nearest to the theatre of the absurd that economic policy can produce.
‘How did this happen, Alexi?’ I demanded.
‘Chouliarakis thinks that we need to make this concession to get an agreement,’ was his answer. Evidently, this was what Stathakis had meant when he said that Chouliarakis was the only one who could bring home a quick agreement: complete capitulation.
I took a deep breath to compose myself. ‘I bet Chouliarakis was also the one who convinced you to send these concessions to Wieser and Dijsselbloem without asking me.’
‘No,’ replied Alexis, ‘that was my idea. Admit it, Yani. You would have objected, for good reasons I am sure. But Yani, when negotiating you must give something to get something back.’
‘And what is it that you got back? What did Chouliarakis tell you to expect from the troika in exchange for another lost decade of punishing austerity for a people that elected us to put an end to the worst and longest austerity drive in capitalist history?’
‘They’ll now have to give us something on debt relief,’ he replied.
For a moment I was lost for words. The folly in his argument was choking me. Then for the first time I spoke to him condescendingly.
