Former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has announced that his MeRA 25 ‘front’ will run as a party in the next general election, and lambasted defence minister and junior coalition partner PanosKammenos, describing him as an extreme-right populist, comparing him to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini.
In an interview today with Greek Skai television, Varoufakis explained why he and his party will enter the fray in the next general election and expressed some bitterness over his former SYRIZA comrades’ attacks against him.
In connection with Kammenos’ reported allegation (which he later denied making) at a cabinet meeting, that the government had received a large amount of money to “buy off foreigners”, an apparent reference to the process of ratifying the Prespa Agreement in FYROM, Varoufakis said: “When they want to sully someone’s reputation and honour, these neo-fascistoids start talking about George Soros,” Varoufakis said, noting that such attacks are anti-Semitic in nature.
Varoufakis reiterated the claim in his book on his tenure as finance minister, Adults in the Room, that Soros in June, 2015, “picked up the phone to ask Tsipras to sack me”.
He did not clarify how he knew this, and why the business magnate would want him to be fired.
Asked about charges that he closed the banks in 2015 and cost the country tens of billions of billons of euros, and about New Democracy’s intention, if it comes to power, to create a parliamentary investigative committee that will probe his actions, Varoufakis declared, “Not only should they form an investigative committee, but let them court marshal me, if they dare.”
