Meet the new Greek Finance Minister

WITH the historic victory by SYRIZA in Greece, under the leadership of Alexis Tsipras, there has been much buzz about the new Finance Minister, Yanis Varoufakis.

An admirer of Karl Marx, a political economist and Professor of Economic Theory at Athens University, in a 2012 trip to Ireland, Yanis gave a wide-ranging interview to Robbie Smyth for IRIS: The Republican Magazine in which he explained why there was "no silver bullet to cure all the problems of capitalism".

Growing up under the Greek military dictatorship of 1967 to 1974, his own father spent eight years in a concentration camp:

"When I was seven, the police dragged him out and he disappeared into a football stadium that had been turned into a prison."

In the early 1970s, his uncle was sentenced to death for political activities. 

He says with all this going on he couldn't be anything but politically minded.

"I was political from the age of zero.When the dictatorship fell in 1974, I was a young teenager, I was already organising and distributing leaflets and all that."

He initially joined Andreas Papandreou's Socialist Party and set up one of the first youth wings of the party. He later went on to briefly serve as an economic advisor to Andreas's son, George Papandreou –a government whose policies which he was an increasingly vocal critic of.

When asked about his economic and political heroes, Yanis told IRIS it was Karl Marx, Che Guevara and Aris Velouchiotis (pictured), leader of the Greek communist anti-Nazi resistance, the Greek People's Liberation Army

"I think Marx defines my frame through which I look at the world," he said.

"He was the first and only person that gave me a glimpse into the astonishing and wonderful and awful contradictions of our era."

Like many young people in the 1970s , Ernesto Che Guevara was high up on his list along with Greek communist and resistance leader Aris Velouchiotis.

"He was effectively responsible for starting the resistance against the Nazis, and he was never one of those communists who became entrenched in Communist Party machinations."

Like Alexis Tsipras, he also has an interest in Ireland.  

He was a supporter of the Troops Out Movement, which campaigned against the British military presence in the North of Ireland. He also recalls songs about the Irish struggle of the 1920s being sung in his house:

"When I was growing up, Ireland was very close to our hearts, particularly the conflict in Northern Ireland. The people I associated with, we felt Belfast was our second home."

In a wide-ranging discussion on the crisis and how to deal with the banking sector catastrophe, debt and under-investment, Yanis summed up his lengthy proposals:

"There is no silver bullet for the crisis. Silver bullets are all very well when you have zombies and werewolves. We don't have them. We have a very simple crisis which can be solved very simply. We need a modicum of common sense and political will to apply that common sense and solve the problem."

• You can read the full five-page interview with Yanis here