Yanis Varoufakis in a V For Vendetta spoof poster
By Nick Squires, Rome
6:00AM GMT 05 Feb 2015
He has been in office barely a week but Greece’s new finance minister has already made a big impression.
His leather jackets, shaved head, passion for motorbikes and forthright language about Greece being subjected to “fiscal waterboarding” have made Yiannis Varoufakis a star of the internet, both at home and abroad.
His new-found fame has spawned parodies on the web, with the former university professor portrayed variously as Dr Spock, Bruce Willis in the action film Die Hard and the Terminator.
His face has been superimposed on an image of Walter White, the main character in the hit US television series Breaking Bad, about a high school teacher who turns to a life of crime manufacturing drugs.
In a spoof image inspired by Star Trek, Mr Varoufakis is portrayed as Dr Spock, trying to read the mind of his nemesis, Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, whose insistence on austerity policies and fiscal rigour he rejects.
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The Marxist academic’s online profile has massively increased in other ways.
His blog, established when he was a barely-known economics professor, now has nearly 9,000 subscribers.
Yanis Varoufakis as Spock (@KROGIAS)
On Twitter he has 197,000 followers – double that of Alexis Tsipras, the new Greek prime minister.
He describes himself on his Twitter account as an economics professor who was “quietly writing obscure academic texts for years, until thrust onto the public scene by Europe’s inane handling of an inevitable crisis.” The “rock star” minister, as he has been dubbed, is the point man in Greece’s battle with Brussels and Berlin over its crushing level of debt and the detested austerity policies imposed by its international creditors, the EU and the IMF.
The 53-year-old economist gave up his job at the University of Texas to join the new government, which has vowed to roll back five years of austerity and to force a renegotiation of the 240 billion euro ($270bn) that has been loaned to Greece.
Yanis Varoufakis as Terminator
He said last week that it was a huge mistake for Europe to “unload the largest loan in human history on the weakest of shoulders.” “An eight or nine-year-old can understand this will not end well. What we have had since… is a kind of fiscal water boarding policy that has turned Greece into a debt colony.”
He recently called the “troika” of lenders – the EU, the IMF and the European Central Bank – “a committee built on rotten foundations.”
Mr Varoufakis, who has held academic posts in Britain and Australia as well as the US, said austerity policies threaten to turn Greece, along with Spain, Italy and other struggling countries in the euro zone, into “a form of Victorian workhouse”.
Hailing the winning of Greece’s election last week by the radical leftist Syriza party, he paraphrased the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas “Greek democracy today chose to stop going gently into the night. Greek democracy resolved to rage against the dying of the light,” he wrote on his blog.
