Original subtitles

From the beginning, I was telling my comrades,

my colleagues, the war cabinet, the Prime Minister

that this is going to be

a multi-month war of attrition.

The creditors will asphyxiate us

and keep on asphyxiating us

until we reach the deadline.

There had to be certain repayments by the Greek state

to the International Monetary Fund

and to the European Central Bank, money we didn't have.

So either we agreed to borrow it from them in order

to pretend that we were repaying them

or there had to be a debt restructure, which is what

the purpose of our election was.

And only at the very last moment when they realised

that we're not going to back down, would they come to us

with an honourable agreement.

That was of the essence... a capacity

to withstand the pressure,

however great it was, up until the very last moment

because the very last moment would be

the only moment of truth.

Everything before that would be

a labyrinth of deception.

The Troika were adamant that Tsípras should not be able

to present himself as a prime minister

who managed to get a deal with them.

They wanted him to be presented as somebody

that was completely and utterly ritually humiliated.

So every time he said yes to their demands,

they asked for something more.

The pressure upon me to resign had reached

its heights.

I didn't resign because I knew they would not allow him

to surrender without dragging him through the mud,

without closing down the banks, without

imposing a tremendous cost upon the people

of Greece for having resisted.

And as long as I maintained in my heart of hearts

the slightest subjective probability of belief that,

when he's in the mud, he would turn around

and say, "Yanis, okay, you were right. Let's do it.

Let's now confront them. Let's now resist them.

Let's now say no to them..." I stayed and I didn't resign.

On the 21st of June 2015,

he made his last ditch attempt

to surrender.

Again, they wouldn't accept his white flag. At that point,

he himself recognized that he's in an impasse.

So, he called a referendum saying to the people of Greece,

"Well, this is the ultimatum that the Troika is giving us.

Yes or no?"

I am very negatively surprised

by today's decisions by the Greek government.

They have apparently rejected

the last proposals on the table from the three institutions

and on that negative basis have proposed to parliament

to have a referendum with, again,

a negative advice to the Greek people.

We will hear from the Greek

minister today in our meeting,

and then talk about future consequences.

The purpose of what we are doing altogether is

to actually restore the stability

of the economy in Greece.

The Greek people on fifth July will be asked

to agree or not to agree with the institution's proposal.

That leaves open the possibility of negotiations

through the night and the day, and the night

and the day ahead of us,

that would improve the institution's proposal.

In my view, the tragedy was that he called the referendum

with the intention of losing it,

whereas I fought that referendum

because I wanted us to win it.

Both of us shared the belief that we were going to lose it

because the moment the referendum was called,

the ATMs ran out of cash.

The ECB closed down our banks in a bid through

what I referred to at the time as the finance minister

of Greece, poignantly

and willfully, as a kind of financial terrorism.

Because there's nothing more terroristic

than closing down the ATMs of the people

before they go on a vote, in order

to extract from them the vote you want

as a creditor of that nation.

Now, what is terrorism? It's the pursuit

of political agendas by means of inspiring fear in people,

mind numbing fear. Well, the choice

that we were given, accept a non-viable agreement

or we'll shut your banks, can be classified as such.

It was a pure case of financial terrorism.

There was no economic reason

to close down the banks except, effectively,

to blackmail the people of Greece to vote in favour

of the Troika deal, in favour of the Troika ultimatum.

With the media and the television screens blasting out

at people in their living rooms

propaganda that if they vote "no" to the ultimatum

of the Troika, Armageddon will hit, and demonising me

and the government and anyone who opposes the Troika.

We thought that this combination in the end, would

push the percentage of voters who

supported us below 50%.

I thought this was inevitable. So did Tsípras.

The difference was that he wanted this to happen,

and I was struggling against this happening.

Let me tell you something, which is probably unknown.

Ever since we declared the referendum

and we incensed our European partners, we had the most

interesting proposals coming from Brussels.

They won't be a "yes" verdict.

I'm quite confident that the Greek people have had enough

of extending and pretending,

like the rest of the world, by the way.

Just to nail you down a little bit more -

Please do. So, if there's a "yes" vote come Monday night,

you will not be finance minister.

I will not. A banner demanding a "no" vote appeared from

the window of the country's finance ministry.

Greece's colourful,

frequently controversial finance minister has been warned

by many leaving figures in Europe that a "no" vote is a vote

to leave the Euro.

He resolutely rejects that. What you're actually doing here

is taking your country out of the Euro.

But you can't tell people because you know they wouldn't

vote for it. No, no, absolutely

not. Absolutely not.

Our membership of the Euro is not at stake,

whether there is a "yes" or

or a "no", there will be an agreement on Monday.

The head of the Eurogroup says that's fantasy,

you're nowhere near an agreement. Who's right?

He would say that, wouldn't he?

He really desperately wants a "yes" vote so as to be able

to go back to his constituency

and to say that they managed to humiliate our government.

This is just petty politics.

It's really not good for Europe.

It's obvious that we will see in the next day various

forms of orchestrated attempts towards...

economic aggression.

It cannot be described in any other way,

but I don't think that this will induce

fear in the population.

I think that it will induce protests.

It's our time to say "no",

because they want the whole our land.

They want our freedom. They want our rights.

They want our properties. They want our homeland.

I think the Greek people will fight back.

We're not populists. We're

trying to do the right thing by the people.

More a six day scramble than a campaign.

But the passion being felt on both sides is without question.

25,000, maybe more, in Athens Central Square

for the final "no" rally.

My hope was that a good referendum result,

a courageous cry by the Greek people,

would make it impossible for Alexis Tsípras, my comrade

and Prime Minister, to betray them,

to go back on them, to say no to them.

I wanted to give the Greek people the

opportunity to write history.

In the end, 62% courageously,

magnificently, voted against the Troika.

It seems you can push people too far.

A five-year-long depression, the impoverishment of a nation,

and finally the Greeks have said "Όχι", "no." Enough.

All the talk of the economic damage

that would be caused, the Armageddon that was sure

to follow, did not deter them.

For five years, they've swallowed economic medicine

that has made their condition worse.

They're not going to take any more of it.

That night, I allowed myself

to enter the prime ministerial residence

at around midnight

once the result was out, convinced, it was

mind over matter,

if you want, that it can't be.

Alexis must now honor that 62%.

I walked into Maximus residence,

the prime ministerial

residence, together with Danae, my wife.

It was like entering a freezer.

Suddenly, I felt like a foreign body.

I could tell that these were people in mourning,

not in celebration.

And I remember when the final result

was flashed on the television screen in the main

living area of the residence,

that I jumped up and punched the air, and then turned around

and realised I was the only one doing it in the room.

Finally, when I entered his office, I could see

that he was distraught,

that he was mourning our victory.

It was a given

that the conversation would not end

well. That night,

my simple message to him was,

"The people out there wrote history.

Are we going to honour it?" And he started giving me all

sorts of excuses.

He even mentioned a word

that in Greek history resonates awfully.

The name is "Γουδή".

Γουδή is a suburb of Athens where there was an execution

of government ministers

after 1922, effectively an allusion to being executed.

I turned around and said, "Fantastic.

Let them make our day.

Imagine if we get executed for doing the right thing.

We will become legends, Alexis."

He offered

me all sorts of different positions

in the government. I turned them all down.

And he said to me, "it's time to surrender."

I disagreed, and I resigned.

A shock announcement after a triumphant victory.

Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis is stepping down.

He's expected to remain in the Syriza party

and is extremely popular at home.

But as Tsípras's government

and Eurozone leaders meet this week,

both sides will be hoping a fresh face on the negotiating

table will bring new impetus to bailout talks.

Yanis Varoufakis resigned earlier this morning.

Does that make it any more likely that Greece is going

to be able to reach a deal with its European creditors?

Yes. I believe European leaders

and Eurogroup officials are relieved that

Mr Varoufakis will no longer be representing Greece at the meetings.

Varoufakis's origins in the center

of politics convinced some in Syriza that he was,

as they put it, a neoliberal,

but they soon found out otherwise. In the negotiations,

Varoufakis was the toughest in favour of a strong deal for Greece,

and the most prepared of all the ministers to, if necessary,

default on Greece's debts and exit the Eurozone.

I never imagined what happened was going

to happen. Any regrets

as you look back on what happened during that period, as to

how it was handled with creditors?

Well, plenty, a myriad of regrets. We failed.

Do you think you messed up at all?

There were mistakes, of course.

It takes incredible obstinacy to argue

that one has not made mistakes, especially

during a five-month period

of extremely intense negotiations against creditors

who were not particularly interested in having a rational

bargaining session, a rational negotiation.

We made mistakes. There's no doubt about that.

And I hold myself responsible for a number of them.

If you could do it all again, what would you change?

There is an infinity of things that I would've changed.

But what should I have done differently,

given what I knew? When we were elected, the clash

with the creditors would've happened

by default within four weeks, which is

a very short space of time

once you're elected. You have four weeks

before Armageddon hits.

Now, my policy was to extend

that period until June, at least,

or July, to give ourselves another four months during which

to try to establish the ground for

an honorable compromise with the creditors.

These four months, instead of being four months during which

the Prime Minister and myself

and the rest of the war cabinet were getting more united,

more prepared and bonded

together in such a way as to maximise our chances

of overcoming,

those four months were used by

Mrs. Merkel to pry Tsípras away from me,

to co-opt him and to prepare him

for the very humiliating process of gradual capitulation,

which led to the surrender of that following summer.

We had weapons that we could use. We didn't use them.

There was a part of our debt, 27 billion,

which is not a very large part of the debt,

but it was a significant part of the debt that was parked

on the books of the European Central Bank.

But that 27 billion was Greek government debt

written in Greek law, which means that I had the capacity

as the Minister of Finance to restructure it, to postpone

by 20 years its repayment.

And then the ECB would have

to contest my decision in a Greek court,

and I would've won, I can assure.

We should remind people that Greek courts

don't act very fast.

Yes, and that that's the one occasion where this delay

in inefficiency would be a godsend.

And the reason why this was an important weapon was

because the only reason why the Euro still exists today is

because Mario Draghi, the president

of the European Central Bank, has saved the Euro,

and he saved it through a kind

of quantitative easing like you had here in Britain,

you still have. The problem that Draghi faced was

that the Central Bank of Germany, which belongs to the,

is part and parcel of the European Central Bank,

was constantly on his case,

constantly trying to undermine him.

They even took Draghi

and the European Central Bank to the Constitutional Court

of Germany in Karlsruhe, effectively asking the German judges,

the German Central bank is asking the German judges

to rule that the Central Bank, through quantitative easing,

was effectively violating the German Constitution.

And if the German judges agreed, effectively

that would stop QE in Europe

and that would end the Eurozone.

Why am I telling you this?

Because the Central Bank's defence

in the Constitutional Court of Germany was, "Yes,

we're buying debt against our charter

but don't worry about it because it'll never be written down

and it will never be restructured."

So, if we restructured that small amount,

relatively small amount, that effectively would be

adding fuel to the case of the Bundesbank,

and the whole of the Eurozone would be in jeopardy.

That was a major weapon we had.

And we had an agreement with the Prime Minister

and with the inner cabinet, what I call the war cabinet,

that we would use it the moment the war

of attrition reached the stage

where they would shut down our banking sector.

But when they did shut down our banks,

and I reminded my colleagues, my comrades,

that we had agreed we would unleash that little weapon

that we had, they vetoed it and they said no.

After the surrender, what happened?

A litany of small surrenders

and abuses of logic against an already suffering population.

In other words, in a country

that was suffering a humanitarian hunger crisis,

VAT on food was increasing, signed

and sealed by a government of the radical left.

The social democratic governments of the 1990s,

they had introduced a small top-up payment

for the minimum pension.

So, pensioners receiving something like €200,

well below the poverty level,

were given a top-up of another €100.

A government of the radical left signed a law

that did away with it.

The saving was minuscule for the budget of the government

but the creditors were insistent on having

the radical left government remove

that €100 payment from the poorest of the poor

and elderly people.

Pensions had already been cut 12 times, by 42%,

before 2015.

So what did they do after they surrendered?

A further 20% reduction.

But the plot gets worse and thickens further.

The whole property bundle of the Greek state,

which includes archeological sites, national treasures,

beaches, ports,

airports, railways,

every single public asset,

it's including water, including electricity, mountains,

even the Lycabettus Hill in Athens where I take my dog

for a walk every morning, every asset

was bundled together

and inserted into something that they called "the Superfund."

The Superfund has one objective,

a fire sale. To sell everything, to sell as much of it

as possible and take the money

and give it to the creditors.

I do not believe that in the history of humanity,

you ended up with this kind of transfer

of property rights from one nation to

another entity without having first being defeated at war.

It is part of human nature

that when you've committed a crime,

when you've damaged other people, it is quite natural,

I understand that, that you would like to think

that everybody's like you.

And the moment you manage to convert someone

who is against those acts

to actually carry them out, you feel better.

So, from the Troika's perspective,

having a government being elected in Greece

of the radical left, which they managed to turn...

take somebody like Tsípras, who made his career

by saying, "No,

Mrs. Merkel, you're going to have to leave our land

and you're going to have to allow us to restore our dignity."

Go back, Merkel, go back.

To have him in the end implement every single one

of the policies that he was elected to oppose,

and also doing a mea culpa

and being the greatest apologist for that failed programme.

That is a wet dream for every torturer,

for every oppressor, for every tyrant.

The Syriza government, once it broke with our contract

with our voters, was bathed in glory by the media.

The lure of that kind of credibility is the worst

enemy of progressive politics.

You were at the height of Greek power.

Oh, not power. Maybe I was in the center of the frame

but I was the finance minister of a bankrupt country.

That doesn't make you particularly powerful, Amy,

It makes you a target,

especially a target of the establishment.

So what awaited you in the coming years?

Nothing angers

and concentrates the mind of the oligarchy more than

that feeling, which is completely unfamiliar to them,

of not remaining in control.

The 62% of the Greeks who voted against them, that "no"

had to be discredited.

Those people had to be made not only to regret

their choices, but also to denounce it,

and to denounce anyone that was associated with it.

By a historical accident, I was chosen to be the person

that the oligarchy targeted.

I had to be brought down symbolically in order to represent

the complete collapse of

what they call themselves "the Greek Spring."

You never lectured or hectored your colleagues in the Eurozone?

Absolutely not. But I can tell

you what I did.

But a lot of people said you did. I'm exceptionally proud of what

I did. A lot of people said you did.

Well, that -

A lot of people said you were the key

obstacle - bring them here so that they can actually confront me.

I need to confront my accusers, Tim.

According to you, everybody's been lying about what took place.

Bring somebody here in front of me -

about what took place, except you.

- bring somebody here in front of me.

It's not credible, Yanis Varoufakis,

that everybody has lied about this except you.

Well, you are - that's stretching in credibility, isn't it?

- you are interviewing me.

I can only tell you what I experienced.

"We would desist from doing anything

that was against Greece's interest."

That's what you wrote. And then you signed an agreement that you

now say is -

Tim, I didn't.

I resigned on the ninth.

But you said a "no" vote would strengthen your

bargaining position.

Yes, provided we still wanted to bargain.

But it didn't. Because we didn't want to bargain

after that. My prime minister decided

to surrender on the night of the referendum.

They were daily fake news stories that were

so abundantly untrue that they confirmed brilliantly

Joseph Goebbels' dictum that if you want awful propaganda,

if you want a gigantic lie to stick, you have

to make sure that the lie is out of proportion,

that it is humongous in size

and that you repeat it constantly.

This is exactly what they did.

But of course, this is nothing personal.

This is what an oligarchy does when an

oligarchy gets threatened.

Thank you for your talk, Mr. Varoufakis,

and I have to say content-wise,

I sympathise with you very much

but I read the reconstruction

of the Guardian last week,

which I'm sure you've read as well.

I'd like to confront you with a few quotes,

two very brief ones.

The first one is, "Varoufakis had done nothing

but exasperate his fellow finance ministers."

It's true. And second of all...

content-wise, you may or may not be right,

but everyone just seems to hate you and -

No, that's not true.

Don't overdo it. Look...

- excuse me, sir, isn't the reason that you lost the battle,

the battle that was so important, isn't it

not because it was totally impossible, but also

because of the way you personally interacted

with everyone, made only enemies

and that was the reason that in the end they just weren't

able and willing to listen to you?

Wasn't that one of the huge problems?

Well, the answer to this very question is very simple:

No. I had very good relationships.

I had a very good relationship personally with all of them,

especially with Wolfgang Schäuble. With Dijsselbloem,

I didn't have a relationship, either positive or negative.

He confirms this. My relations

with my interlocutors in Brussels, in Berlin, Paris,

were at a personal level, very good,

mostly. Especially with the German Finance Minister

after their first one or two meetings,

they became very cordial

and very warm. With the French, perfect. With the head

of the European Central Bank

and the number two, Benoît Cœuré, splendid.

The problem Greece's creditors had with me was

one and very simple.

They could see in me, someone that would rather die

than sign on the dotted line of another

extend-and-pretend bailout loan.

The pressure which was inordinate,

that was being asserted upon me, was just a walk in the park

compared to what my dad went through.

My dad ended up in a concentration camp

because he was refusing to put his signature

where he was being told to put it.

So when I was in Brussels and in Frankfurt

and in Berlin, and I was being confronted

by this immense pressure, I caught myself on a couple

of occasions thinking "if only they knew."

Yes. So what kept you? Because it was hard.

Yes. If you signed you could get

out. Yes, I was,

I would be free,

but I never did it.

I believed in my own spirit.

Do you regret not signing?

No, never. Never.

I resisted. Never.

They would have these big sacks that

were originally used to carry potatoes,

and they would put him in there together with a cat.

A cat. Tied them and throw it in the sea.

So the cat would be drowning and tear up his face.

And then they would pull him out and say, "Will you sign?"

"No." Do it again, with a cat.

Some occasions, with snakes. They had to endure

serial killings.

So they would line them up on top of a cliff next

to the sea, overlooking the waves

and they would line ten of them up

and they would go to the first one

and say, "Okay, will you sign?"

and say, "no." Shot in the head.

Some would break and sign, the rest died.

So, that was one of the favorite

tortures,

which is not torture, just murder.

Do you have a message for the young people of today?

Yes. They must try always.

You must try hard.

After the referendum,

how did the public respond to the betrayal?

Most people failed to recognize what a motivating force

dignity can be

and a project for restoring it.

Unemployment, not being able to fend

for oneself, to put food on the table,

to look after their children,

these are all scourges.

But the worst effect that they have on the human soul is

that they deny one a sense of dignity, a sense

of autonomy, a sense of pride.

The beauty of that

Syntagma Square gathering on the 3rd of July in 2015

was disenfranchised, powerless

people got together

and, by the act of getting together, they managed

to feel dignity flooding back into their souls.

So, when three days later,

the prime minister overthrew the people's will

and took that energy, that dignity restoration project,

and shoved it into the dustbin of history

by converting their courageous "no" into

an undignified "yes",

the very same people who were elated on

that night were distraught.

I could see people on street corners bumping into each other

and without speaking, they would hug

and cry as a result of the indignity

of the moment of surrender.

This contrast is going to stay with me forever.

And if I'm motivated by anything, it is

by the disappointment

and rage at the dying of that particular light,

and an urgency for restoring it.