4 responses to “Can Yanis Varoufakis Overcome the EU’s ‘Institutional Inertia’?”

1. Meanwhile…

   “Greece reshuffled its bailout-negotiating team, reining in Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, after three months of talks with creditors failed to unlock aid and a meeting with his euro-area counterparts ended in acrimony.

   The coordination of the day-to-day efforts to strike a deal with creditors was handed to Deputy Foreign Minister Euclid Tsakalotos, a Greek government official said in an e-mail to reporters Monday. Varoufakis will supervise the political negotiations with euro-area member states and the International Monetary Fund. No change was announced to Greece’s representation in euro-area finance ministers’ meetings, which Varoufakis attends.

   A Eurogroup meeting in Riga, Latvia on Friday descended into name-calling as the currency bloc’s finance ministers hurled abuse at their Greek colleague, accusing him of being a time-waster, a gambler and an amateur. Still, the 54-year-old academic-turned-politician in the government of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras remains popular at home, with 55 percent of respondents in an Alco survey published in Proto Thema newspaper Sunday expressing a positive view about him.

   “This move squares the circle, because it doesn’t look like Tsipras is surrendering by firing Varoufakis, but it to some extent has the same result,” said Michael Michaelides, a strategist at Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc in London. “It doesn’t change the issues, but given the interpersonal nature of the Eurogroup, and since the finance ministers still remain in charge, this is significant.”

   http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-27/greece-clips-varoufakis-s-wings-as-it-reorganizes-bailout-team

   Not a surprising maneuver, given his sheer opposition (albeit with moderate solutions) to the neoliberal program, but a shame, in my opinion…

   • indeed, he at least he kept the conversation worth listening to, Zizek has recently been on the right track that the coming failures at negotiations in Greece are likely the beginning of much less civil forms of exchange, all bets will be off for “diplomacy”…

     • Hm, Zizek making sense! Do you have a link?

       I would wager that he is right. One of the major points that Varofakis has been bringing to the table is the fundamental tension – if not incompatibility – between neoliberal economic programs and social democratic platforms (which is really, to varying degrees, the supposed basis of Western political governmentality). Or, more properly, social democracy is the benevolent face of capitalism – not only do you get to vote with your currency in the market of the everyday, but you get a say in policies too! This realization is of course nothing new but it’s rare to hear coming from a government member, much less a finance minister.

       What we’re seeing here recently is the slacking off of the democratic face. This is fundamentally different from the violence of the military-industrial sovereign put forward by the neoconservatives – it’s a generalized decomposition across a variety of coordinates. We’ll see more of what we’ve been seeing, the systematic repression of people to insulate and protect capital, property, production, and those who own these things. The days of conscious capital, which had it’s day in the sun from the early 90s to a gradual decline across the 2000s, may be winding down.

     • well ya know when he gets away from that lacanian nonsense and sticks closer to the news he’s ok, if i remember where i came across that will share it here.
       as states/govts give out (and just give up) they will take most of the infrastructures of capitalisms down with them, gonna be ugly i’m afraid.