Yanis Varoufakis's Blog, page 3

In the EU nothing succeeds like gross failure: The astonishing case of Ursula von der Leyen – Der Freitag 29 MAY 2025

Failure, corruption and warmongering: Ursula von der Leyen is awarded the International Charlemagne Prize of Aachen for her contribution to the EU – because in Europe utter failure is not only tolerated, but celebrated!It is one of life’s guilty pleasures when one’s cynical prejudices are confirmed. One such moment, when I allowed myself a long, hard laugh, came as the news arrived that Ursula von der Leyen had been awarded the International Charlemagne Prize of Aachen for “her services to the unity of the Member States, in the containment of the pandemic, for the unity of the Union’s determination to defend itself against Russia — and for the impetus towards the Green Deal.” It was now official: In Brussels, nothing succeeds like gross failure and, even worse, nothing is rewarded more generously than corruption.Let me begin with the above rationale for the Prize: Mrs von der Leyen’s “impetus towards the Green Deal”. Can they be serious? Future historians will zero in on the so-called Green Deal as an example of what is wrong with the European Union: smoke and mirrors masquerading as majestic policy initiatives. Indeed, when it was announced, and after studying it carefully, I rushed out an article in The Guardian to warn against the Green Deal on two grounds: first, the money it promised to invest in the green transition was simply not there and, secondly, the heralded deal was rather… brown – in that it aimed at greenwashing far more than at greening Europe. Four years later, the Green Deal was declared a gross failure and was unceremoniously ditched in favour of Ursula von der Leyen’s next white elephant: the folly of building up a European military-industrial complex under the codenames Re-Arm Europe or SAFE.Why is it folly to think that von der Leyen’s Commission will spearhead a European military-industrial complex? For three reasons, as I have explained elsewhere. First, as in the case of the Green Deal, the money is not there and the EU cannot credibly commit to finding it given its steadfast refusal to form a proper fiscal union. Secondly, even if money were not a problem, the EU lacks the federal institutions to construct a top-down, paneuropean military-industrial complex, instead of the existing patchwork of nation-state based companies that compete with one another with the backing of their national governments. Thirdly, even if neither money nor a federal-like set of institutions were a problem, Europe would not be able (I hope!) to emulate the United States’ capacity to wage one war after the other to ensure a constant demand for weapons and munitions.Two terms as President of the European Commission, two gross and rather costly failures. But these failures would not be enough to burnish Mrs von der Leyen’s credentials and seal her rise to the lofty heights that justified granting her the International Charlemagne Prize of Aachen. No, for that splendid Prize to be awarded, she needed to add certified corruption to her gross failure. Thankfully, she did!Showing a remarkable determination to break the law both in her own country, Germany, and in the European Union, Mrs von der Leyen succeeded in being sanctioned in both jurisdictions for treating the public with contempt in pursuit of her own interests. As Germany’s defence minister, she desperately tried to conceal her involvement in shady defence contracts by sabotaging the Bundestag’s investigation in the matter through the “illegal and deliberate” deletion of her phone contents. As European Commission President, the EU top court found her culpable of repeating the unlawful practice of deleting her phone records of illicit personal exchanges with heads of global corporations – on this occasion with the CEO of Pfizer with whom she negotiated, on Europe’s behalf, lucrative COVID-19 vaccine deals.With these findings pointing to despicable behaviour under her belt, and her majestic policy failures (the Green Deal, Re-Arm and SAFE) on hand, Ursula von der Leyen was almost a shoo in for the International Charlemagne Prize of Aachen. Almost but not quite! To push through the finishing line she needed to add another credential to her curriculum vitae: she needed to become the cheerleader of Israel’s army. Thankfully for our European Commission President, the opportunity arose after Hamas attacked Israel on 7th October 2023. Immediately, Mrs von der Leyen sprang to action.Without any authority or authorisation – since neither foreign nor defence policy is in the purview of the Commission President – she landed in Tel Aviv, not as a campaigner for an immediate end to war crimes on all sides, nor as an ambassador of Peace & Reconciliation or as an advocate of International Law or as a believer in the simple idea that the Geneva convention is humanity’s last hope in the darkest of hours. No, she went there to pose in front of Israeli tanks poised to enter Gaza with the air of a proud cheerleader on Grand Final day. She went there as an enabler of the war crime of denying two million non-combatants water and food, as a cheerleader of an air force intentionally targeting people’s homes, as a facilitator of the war crime of transferring a million people to other parts of Gaza where they were also bombed.Thus, Mrs von der Leyen’s exhausting work was done, her triple whammy of failure-corruption-warmongering completed. She was now the prime candidate for the International Charlemagne Prize of Aachen, which she received gladly. Without a hint of irony, I believe that it was well deserved and fully consistent with that particular prize’s background and history. After all, whether deservedly or undeservedly, the long dead European Emperor whose name the Prize carries has, for many years now, been appropriated by the inanest of Europe’s leaders in a frantic search for self-aggrandisement. To make the point, let me take you back to a dull autumnal afternoon when two suited men exuding authority entered Aachen’s Cathedral.The calendar read September 15th 1978 and the two men were there to pay their respects to the remains of Charlemagne, the 9th Century Frankish King who had briefly re-united the Roman Empire and whose spirit encapsulated, for traditionalist Central Europeans, Pan-Europa or Mittel-Europa – a borderless Christian European realm.Standing above the Christian warrior’s grave, and next to his ancient throne, the two pilgrims sought to quell their considerable trepidation caused by what they had just done: commit their two countries, France and Germany, to bundle their money together with an agreement, they had signed earlier that day to create the so-called European Monetary System (EMS) – the euro’s precursor.“Perhaps while we were discussing monetary affairs”, said one of the two to an Italian journalist, “the spirit of Charlemagne brooded over us.” His name? President Valéry Giscard d’ Estaing of France. The second pilgrim appealing to Charlemagne’s ghost for its approval of the monetary union with France was German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt.Setting aside the awful Euro-kitsch aesthetic of two leaders visiting the tomb of a Christian warrior king to steady their nerves over creating perhaps history’s most pathetic monetary union, it is heartening to realise that the EU has a long tradition of soap opera-like celebrations of failure. After all, the exchange rate mechanism that the two men established back then failed spectacularly but Europe still celebrates them to this day. As for the euro, which was born as a result of the calamity that was the EMS, it also proved a calamity for Europe and Europeans. And yet, in 2002, the committee awarding the International Charlemagne Prize of Aachen chose to award that year’s prize to… the euro!In this European Union, where nothing succeeds like failure, especially when laced with corruption and most recently warmongering, Mrs von der Leyen is the most deserved recipient of the International Charlemagne Prize of Aachen.

For the DER FREITAG site, where the above was originally published in German, click here.

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How Europe’s sheer stupidity combined with its ethical downfall to underwrite Israel’s genocide of Palestinians – Middle East Eye

“A mixture of stupidity and nastiness… The liberal establishment is primarily responsible for the genocide of the Palestinians.” In this episode of UNAPOLOGETIC, Yanis Varoufakis unleashes a fierce critique of Western liberalism, and tells us why he feels that the global system is in crisis. This episode explores the facade of Western moral superiority, the role of empire past and present, how liberal hypocrisy has given rise to fascism, the climate crisis, Gaza and why Varoufakis places his hope in the Global South. UNAPOLOGETIC is Hosted by Ashfaaq Carim Chapters 00:00 Intro 02:01 Western civilisation and its hypocrisy 04:27 Gaza, genocide and colonial legacies 10:09 2008: The collapse of capitalism 15:28 Technofeudalism and the rise of cloud capital 17:06 Trump’s tariffs and the new Nixon shock 21:18 Liberal complicity in Gaza 26:55 Europe’s civil liberties crackdown 29:59 Palestine and the loss of moral resistance 33:19 Why protesters lack hope in the West 38:56 China vs. Russia: A critical distinction 41:02 China’s authoritarianism vs. local democracy 44:42 Climate collapse and cloud capital 48:46 Organising after collapse: What’s the alternative? 50:00 Varoufakis’ vision for change

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Our New Economic World Order & Europe’s Suicide: In discussion with Glenn Diesen

The hitherto US-centric economic model has exhausted itself, and Trump’s government is pushing to restructure the international economic architecture to maintain US hegemony. China is the main rival in this new reality, while the Europeans are becoming an impoverished appendage to the US. The Europeans could chart a more favourable path forward, except that they lack the political structures, the collective action institutions and, sadly, the moral integrity to be able to think in terms of the interests of most Europeans.

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What’s behind Trump’s tariff policy? Will it work? On BREAKING POINTS

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UNHERD’s Freddie Sayers interviews Y. Varoufakis & W. Munchau on Europe’s prospects in the era of Trump

UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers interviews renowned economist and former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis and Eurointelligence founder Wolfgang Münchau as they dissect the escalating trade war between Europe and the United States. With the US recently striking a so-called trade deal with the UK, and news of India signing a comprehensive agreement with the UK, tensions are soaring as Europe, China, and others threaten retaliation against President Trump’s aggressive tariffs. From economic fallout to geopolitical manoeuvering, they reveal why Europe risks losing ground and what’s at stake for the global economy in 2025.

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Some thoughts on the 80th Anniversary of Victory over Fascism

Eighty years ago today, the monstrous machinery of the Third Reich was finally ground to dust. The swastika was torn from the Reichstag, the death camps liberated, and Europe—bloodied, traumatised, but unbowed—emerged from history’s darkest night.It was not merely a military victory; it was the triumph of solidarity over fascism, of internationalism over racial tyranny, of humanism over industrial-scale slaughter.And yet—and yet—that magnificent victory, which we have every reason to remember and to celebrate today, proved that there is no such thing as a final victory against fascism, against misanthropy, in a world built on the systematic exploitation of People and Nature – a world not yet mature enough for Peace with Justice.It took no time after that magnificent victory against fascism for the victors to co-opt the defeated fascists to trounce freedom fighters who had fought against fascism. In Greece, in Vietnam, in Indonesia, in South Africa, across the West, the victors employed fascists to maintain the prewar colonial order, the prewar pseudo-liberal regimes whose economic and ethical bankruptcy had begat fascism.Today, fascism’s spectre is rising again. In Ukraine, in the same battlefields where it was crushed, Nazism lives on, armed to the teeth, striking out both from within the Azov Battalion and the Wagner Group. In the European Union fascism is back — not in jackboots and sieg heils, but in the xenophobic demagogues in our parliaments, in the militarised borders of Fortress Europe, in Europe’s rearmament madness, in Europe’s sickening support for the last Apartheid state’s genocide of the Palestinians.The defeat of Nazism was not the work of generals or politicians alone. It was the result of sacrifices by millions of unsung heroes—partisans, women and men resistance fighters, ordinary soldiers, the working women and men who starved and bled to break fascism’s spine. That is the legacy we must reclaim. Not the hollow nationalism of flag-waving, of military parades – but the radical, internationalist solidarity that once united the world against tyranny.Eighty years on, the fight is not over. Lest we forget fascism was not just defeated in 1945—it was out-organised, out-mobilised, out-dreamed. And if we are to defeat its heirs today, we must do the same.No pasarán—never again!

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Discussing Trump’s Economic Masterplan with David Marr, on ABC Late Night Live

Economist Yanis Varoufakis says we shouldn’t underestimate Trump – he has a plan to shock the global economy, force foreign countries to buy crypto-currency in return for a deal on tariffs, and ultimately pay down debt and keep the US dollar at the centre of the global financial system. But it’s a high risk strategy that also paves the way for the “tech bros” to make a lot of money.GUEST: Yanis Varoufakis, Professor of Economics at the University of Athens, Co-Founder of the political movement DiEM25 and author of  Technofeudalism – What Killed Capitalism.  PRODUCER: Catherine Zengerer

For the ABC site click here.

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NEOLIBERALISM IS DEAD. SAY HELLO TO TECHLORDISM – Project Syndicate op-ed & video

Neoliberalism was neither new nor particularly liberal when it prevailed 50 years ago. Its great advantage was its sharp deviation from classical liberalism. Even though it paid tribute to liberal thinkers, neoliberalism shared neither their method nor their concept of the market. Today, we are on the cusp of another, equally profound, ideological innovation.Unlike Adam Smith or John Stuart Mill, neoliberals felt no responsibility to demonstrate, theoretically or empirically, under what circumstances the unfettered market could be relied upon to transmute private profit-seeking into collective prosperity. The invisible hand was divine, infallible. Even when the market failed, they claimed, any attempt to correct it through some collective agency was doomed to fail more horribly. It was an attitude that suited Wall Street to a tee.The 1970s craved such doctrinal indifference to actual evidence about the consequences of fully deregulating financial markets. Once America had become a deficit country and President Richard Nixon delivered his shock by decoupling the dollar from gold in 1971, successive administrations chose to enhance US global hegemony by boosting – not curtailing – the country’s fiscal and trade deficits.Predictably, Wall Street banks were assigned the crucial role of recycling (into US Treasuries, equities, and real estate) the dollars foreign exporters were raking in as a result of America’s deficit-fueled demand for their wares. But, to do this – to become the hub of this audacious global surplus recycling scheme – the bankers had to be liberated from regulatory restraint, which meant that legislators and a public taught, since 1929, to fear an out-of-control Wall Street, had to be re-educated. Neoliberalism’s fundamentalist orthodoxy exalting the sanctity of deregulated markets, reflected in the growing influence of the “law and economics” movement, fulfilled that requirement perfectly.Today, the ascendancy of a new form of capital – cloud capital, or networked algorithmic machines that furnish its owners’ remarkable powers to modify our behavior – needs its own ideology to be fully liberated. I have called this new system technofeudalism – a mode of production and distribution which, powered by cloud capital, is replacing markets with cloud fiefs (like Amazon) and capitalist profits with cloud rents.To realize the full power of cloud capital, its owners (people like Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk) require a new ideology. Just as Wall Street financiers needed neoliberalism after the Nixon shock, this new ideology must support cloud capital’s expanding domain in three ways.First, it must legitimize the colonization of human endeavor. Beginning with the relaxation of rules governing, say, self-driving vehicles and AI-driven medical and legal services, the ideology must justify the limitless replacement of fallible, recalcitrant humans by cloud capital-driven machines in every realm – including work that gives us pleasure (such as translating poetry) or that we should want to perform (such as raising children). The deeper cloud capital can penetrate tasks hitherto carried out by humans, the greater the cloud rents flowing to the technofeudal class.Second, the new ideology must legitimize the colonization of state institutions, especially the privatization of public data through its transfer to Big Tech’s cloud capital. It must, for example, justify Musk’s use of his Department of Government Efficiency to hook his cloud capital systems into various federal agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service, or the hard-wiring by Thiel’s defense firm Palantir and Google of their interfaces into the Pentagon, making their cloud capital indispensable to the military-industrial complex.Third, it must legitimize the colonization of Wall Street. Zuckerberg was the first technofeudalist to try to create his own digital currency, Libra. Wall Street foiled him. But then Musk’s purchase of Twitter, now X, evolved into a bolder attempt to create an “Everything App” that challenges Wall Street’s payments monopoly. Encouraged by President Donald Trump’s executive order directing the Federal Reserve to create a strategic crypto reserve, Big Tech, seeking to provide unfettered cloud finance outside traditional financial markets, needs more than ever to justify the merger of its cloud capital with financial services.This new ideology is already here. I call it techlordism, a mutation of transhumanism – a creed that advocates blurring the lines between organic and synthetic until augmented humans achieve genuine freedom, or even immortality. Just as neoliberalism borrowed from classical liberalism but usurped it by adding a divinity (the infallible market), techlordism makes itself useful to cloud capital’s three-pronged colonization drive by replacing the neoliberal Homo Economicus with an amorphous “HumAIn” (a human-AI continuum).Technolordism also replaces neoliberalism’s divine being. The new divinity is the algorithm that renders the signaling functions of the decentralized market mechanism obsolete, yielding (in the image of amazon.com) a totally centralized mechanism for matching buyers and sellers.The repercussions of the societal transformation accelerated by techlordism are breathtaking. They include unprecedented macroeconomic instability (as cloud rents decimate aggregate demand), the demise of democracy, even as an ideal (a position advocated by Thiel, an early prophet of techlordism), and the end of universities (replaced by personalized AI-driven augmentations).In this light, Trump is a godsend to the technofeudalists. His agenda – fully deregulating their AI-driven services, bolstering crypto, and exempting their cloud rents from taxation – is supercharging cloud capital’s power to extract rents. For the new ruling class, whatever money they lose in the short run from Trump’s tariff delusions must seem like a magnificent long-term investment.

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NEOLIBERALISM IS DEAD. SAY HELLO TO TECHLORDISM

After 1971, neoliberalism was an ideology essential in legitimising the emancipation of financial capital from the regulatory shackles of the New Deal and the post-war Bretton Woods system.Today, a new form of capital is on the ascendancy and needs its own ideology to be fully liberated: cloud capital. Cloud capital has created a new system that is no longer predicated on markets or profit. I have called it Technofeudalism – a new mode of production and distribution that, powered by cloud capital, has replaced (a) markets with cloud fiefs (like Amazon) and (b) capitalist profits with cloud rents.Fully to realise the power of their cloud capital, the technofeudal lords (Bezos, Thiel, Musk etc.) needed a new ideology, just like the financiers needed (after the end of Bretton Woods) neoliberalism. So, what did they replace neoliberalism with? They replaced it with the ideology of techlordism.Techlordism replaces neoliberalism’s liberal individual with an amorphous HumAIn (a human-AI continuum).Techlordism also replaces neoliberalism’s fundamentalist belief in the divine mechanism of the market with another divinity: the algorithm that bypassed the signal processing functions of the decentralised market mechanism, yielding a perfectly centralised mechanism for matching buyers and sellers.In this light, Trump is to the technofeudal lords, the cloudalists, nothing more than a useful tool. He is useful to them in that his policies (full deregulation of their AI-driven ‘services’, along with massive tax cuts for the cloudalists) supercharge the capacity of their cloud capital to extract more cloud rent from the rest of the economy.So, in this context, losing money from Trump’s tariff extravaganza in the short run is a tiny price to pay for a massive long term ‘investment’ in their technofeudal empire.

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‘Democracy under fire’: My remarks at the London Press Conference on the Vanishing Right to Protest (11-4-2025) alongside Juliet Stevenson, Holocaust survivor Stephen Kapos, Jeremy Corbyn, Chris Nineham and Ben Jamal

We are here today because democracy is on death row, because the treasured right to dissent is at gunpoint, because your capacity to do journalism is under fire.I remember when I came to Britain as a student in 1978 how overjoyed I was to be in a country where I felt safe from the secret police, happy to be living in a democracy where dissent was protected. Back then, I recall Mick McCaughey – the legendary Scottish miners’ union leader – warning me: “Don’t take it for granted my lad”, he said. “If democracy threatens to change anything, they will ban it.” I must say I did not believe him. I did not want to believe him. Today, his words are ringing true across this land, indeed across the West.The West has not recovered from the Crash of 2008. Donald Trump, the British government’s current fiscal mess, Europe’s stagnation, trade wars that are – in reality – vicious class wars – these are all mere symptoms of the wholesale disintegration of the realm of financialised, globalised capitalism that prevailed in the 1970s, riding on the coattails of the Nixon Shock.The more concentrated power has become the more brittle its foundations are proving.The more brittle its foundations are proving the more determined the powers-that-be become to shut down debate, dialogue, democracy.This is why the chilling winds of totalitarianism are blowing harder than ever today.Here in Britain. In Germany. In France. In the United States.The use of Newspeak is truly meant to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.Just as in the 1930s, a moral clarifier has emerged: Then, you were marked as a problem if you did your duty to defend Jews from Oswald Mosley’s and Adolf Hitler’s brownshirts. Today, you are marked as a problem if you defend Palestinians’ right to exist as Palestinians. The point, as in the 1930s, is to contain dissent.Fear of incarceration, of deportation, of exclusion is meant to enhance self-censorship and narrow down the range of dissent.The narrowing of the range of dissent is meant to narrow the range of what can be thought.The narrowing of the range of what can be thought, of what can be imagined, is essential in maintaining control by a regime that is losing control of its own faculties, of its own system.This is why the system’s political handmaidens in government are working hard to ensure that protest is turned from a fundamental right into a gift from the state.Perhaps the most remarkable method by which democracy is strangled is this phoney clash between Trumpists, who wax lyrical about free speech of bigots, and the centrists who present themselves as the protectors of core democratic principles. The case of Julian Assange demonstrates perfectly both sides’ hypocrisy.Was it not Trump, Biden, Johnson and Starmer who joined forces to criminalise Julian’s brilliant, accurate, essential journalism?Are Trump and Starmer not buddies in how they criminalise those of us who refuse to consent to the Palestinian genocide, including our heroic Jewish comrades?Was it not the whole gamut of the German political centre complicit in banning me from Germany because we dared collaborate with German-Jewish comrades, heroes like Iris Hefetz and Udi Raz, to hold a conference in Berlin under the utterly subversive title “A Just Peace in the Middle East”?With around forty peaceful left-wingers in prison, here in Britain, today, for the dastardly crime of organising protests that once upon a time would have been considered perfectly legitimate, I feel privileged to appear in front of you here today, honoured to be sitting next to Stephen Kapos and to Chris Nineham in a bid jointly to proclaim and to ring alarm bells:that democracy is on death rowthat the treasured right to dissent is at gunpointthat your capacity to do journalism is under fire.It is time we took a stand.It is time you took a stand.If not now, tomorrow may well prove too late.

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