Yanis Varoufakis on Angela Merkel’s Legacy, European Politics & the “Sordid Arms Race” on the Seas

this is democracy now democracynow.org the war and peace report i'm amy goodman with juan gonzalez as we turn now to germany where the center-left social democratic party narrowly claim victory sunday an election that puts an end to the 16-year era of angela merkel's conservative leadership merkel's party the christian democrats won the second most votes with the green party coming in third social democrats will now have to form a ruling coalition which could take weeks or possibly months the sdp's candidate for chancellor olaf schultz who positioned himself as a leader in the vein of merkel during his campaign vowed to tackle the climate crisis and modernize industry he says well for more on what this means for europe and the world we're joined in greece by janis varoufakis he's member of the greek parliament former finance minister of greece who negotiated with chancellor merkel and international creditors in 2015 when they demanded harsh new austerity measures for a european bailout of greece largely at merkel's behest although at some points verofakis was excluded from the negotiations his latest piece for jacob is headlined angela merkel was bad for europe and the world his new book is called another now we welcome you back to democracy now giannis if you can first talk about what's happened in germany what it means for greece and for the world well it's good to be back amy thank you uh look not much has changed let's not hyperventilate about the great changes uh we point number one angela merkel was not defeated she's the first german chancellor in the post-war era that has not been defeated she's resigned so she is going home because she's had enough point number one point number two uh the previous administrations at least the last two were administrations that the so-called grand coalitions between the christian democrats and the social democrats have now narrowly beat the christian them so it's not as if any opposition democrats are coming into government they were into government the olive schultz who is going to be chancellor if this uh coalition um that he is now concocting comes to christian he was finance minister until yesterday so let's uh you know take down a few notches all the hype about the great changes that we're going to see in germany the other point which is very important two points if i may quickly one brief ones firstly the austerity that hit our country here in greece in 2010 was first practiced in 2009 not to such an extent but it was first practiced put into place in germany in 2009 2008 2009 by the social democrats themselves so it's not as if the social democrats are an anti-austerity party they were the inventors of austerity and they practiced it ruthlessly in germany and finally the point i need to make is that whoever is in this government and whoever leads this government this governance is going to contain for the first time since ages the so-called free democratic free the free democrats of germany the fdp which is a very strong austerian right-wing libertarian-even party and they are going to exact the pound of flesh from the social democrats or the christian democrats or the greens whoever joins them up their price for joining the um the government will be business as usual well giannis varfakas you've argued in the articles you published in the new statesman and jacobin that um that merkel's austerity policies condemned europe and germany to decline could you expand on that happily i remember lehman brothers and the great financial meltdown of 2008 uh very soon after that angela merkel found out to her you know disbelief that the german banks were also kaput bankrupt and so were the french banks so were all the banks in the european union including the british ones and they had to actually salvage them like president obama did in the united states except that unlike president obama uh the europeans had given up on having any a central bank a national central bank so they affected a cynical transfer of instead of printing money instead of having the central bank of europe the ecb print the money which is what em geithner and larry summers and barack obama did in the united states instead of doing that they transferred their losses onto the shoulders of the weakest taxpayers who were greeks you know working-class germans and so on so you had socialism for the very few for the bankers and harsh austerity for everyone else not just the greeks but the german workers the french workers the slovak workers the portuguese workers the spanish workers now what happens when you do that you know the bankers have been very floated they are constantly being given money that the central bank prints and the masses are suffering and labor under the yoke of austerity now big business looks at the little people out there and says oh well they will not be able to afford the equivalent of a german tesla let's say so they don't build one they don't invest so investment is very low good quality jobs disappear they are replaced by many jobs deliver jobs you know the gig economy so you have discontent across europe you have low levels of investment in the places that are the richest like germany and of course you have non-existent investment in places like greece this is what i said when i when i'm trying to make the point in the articles that you kindly mentioned that angel america leaves the chancellory the office of prime minister of germany much stronger than she inherited because of the crisis she leaves germany complete and replete and full of economic surpluses of you know surplus money but she also lives it with low levels of low levels of investment and effectively condemned to be falling behind china and the united states when it comes to the things humanity and europeans will be needing in the next few years which is green energy artificial intelligence high-tech companies that can combine the green transition with some degree of shared prosperity i wanted to ask you about another issue that uh marks i guess uh merkel's legacy is the issue of uh immigration i mean we we're seeing new images again not just in the united states of haitians and central americans at the at the border but now uh once again uh in uh southern europe of 600 asylum seekers yesterday and one boat in in italy a huge increase in those escaping from africa and the middle east coming to europe uh greece obviously has been dealing with this but merkel uh it was distinguished among the leaders by initially welcoming hundreds of thousands of migrants into germany when other countries were trying to close their borders your sense of her legacy in terms of migration policy and how migration is affecting europe given the fact that these imperial powers keep waging wars this uh disrupting these countries creating a chaos and then insisting that migrants cannot come into europe yes yes so right i mean it was such a show hypocrisy recently when the taliban moved into kabul and the liberal press in the united states and of course in the european union they were horrified by this the site of the taliban taking over and all these concerns about the liberal progressive afghans especially women and then at the very same time you know our great and good leaders the same ones who were lamenting the success of the taliban um they started talking about raising the height of the fences that they're building um you know to turn europe into a fortress europe not one mention of letting the afghan women that are being persecuted by the taliban coming but going back to your question about um america's legacy when it comes to to immigration look there was a key word in your question that was initially her initial response in 2015 in the summer of 2015 when the tali when the when the syrian refugees came storming in running away from the civil war in syria her initial response was great i mean i even tweeted that and you know i'm not i'm not a political ally of angela merkel i said in my tweets that i i'm proud to be european because of angela merkel because she said let them in my goodness and she let one million people in but then immediately her pragmatism kicks in she is the leader of a conservative party that would was about to eat her upper life to put it blunt not too bluntly i hope and within two weeks she reversed course so that initial response shows that the woman is probably a very decent person and you know all kudos to her but within two weeks she spoke to the turkish president mr erdogan and together they concocted a travesty of a policy effectively the european union under merkel's guidance bribed with a few billion euros the president of turkey the turkish government to allow the european union to violate international law not to allow refugees you know refugees are in on these ramshackle boats that end up on lesbos the greek islands right you know they really don't have the right to seek asylum because merkel and erdogan agreed years ago with the approval of my former commerce in this government after i resigned the french the italians and so on yeah they agreed that turkey is a safe country and therefore no refugees from syria from afghanistan from wherever uh has the right the dramatic right to file an application for refugee status even if they've been tortured you know this is absolutely preposterous so you have the initial reaction which will good and then you have what has been happening over the last few years here is um a piece of information which is significant uh last week two weeks ago a concentration camp a prison camp was built with european union money as part of the merkel legacy on the island of samos now on the one hand uh you have those who are waxing lyrical about it because those refugees that used to live in tents and they would you know tenses would be washed away whenever there was a wintry storm or rain heavy rain falling uh you know suddenly they had decent dwellings they even had um you know a restaurant they had wi-fi but what they forget was to to mention is that there is also barbed wire surrounding them so these people can stay in there for years for having committed the crime of coming to europe to seek refugee status very quickly uh janis varifakas you're speaking to us from a greek island and so we're having a little trouble with the skype but um uh thank you all for bearing with us you tweeted on tuesday at a time when the u.s and france are competing on which of the two will undermine peace in the pacific more effectively the greek prime minister is pushing greece further into debt bondage by purchasing french frigates with a nod from biden so as to play craig mcconnell greece deserves better and of course talking about august this new military alliance to marginalize china um many are asking if if it's biden who is really creating a new cold war with china he makes a deal with the uk and australia for it was a deal 65 billion dollars nuclear-powered subs and this cut france out they felt stabbed in the back so now france is making a deal with greece further militarizing the world your thoughts i am um ever so you know depressed by this you know we're not learning any lessons from the past uh you put quite rightly there is a sordid arms race arms deal race happening in the pacific so you know the french want to make some money out of the australians by selling them submarines the americans come in and they cut the french out of the deal the french get seriously peeved all this is happening supposedly in order to increase security in the pacific it is doing exactly the opposite because the chinese are simply going to respond to this arms race by you know just upping the ante building more of their own nuclear subs the nuclear subs are a waste in any case now we you know we we live in a in a technological world where we have transparent oceans these you know old-fashioned nuclear submarines neither here nor there they are not increasing security if they increase anything it is insecurity but there is a lot of money to be made by the french who want to sell them by the american government who wants to make sure that their mates that are producing these nuclear subs get the the deals from australia and macron is stopped and then suddenly president biden decides to you know to to throw him uh a few more cells of bread in order to pacify him and that is to give the green light to the greek prime minister to buy three or four frigates from the french government which exactly what are they going to contribute to our security yes we do have a problem with turkey we have a recalcitrant turkey we have a turkish regime that traditionally proves imperialist or acts imperialistically when it wants to solidify its own founding base within turkey because it is a dictatorship and our turkish commerce turkish democrat democratic comrades are suffering under it so whenever the turkish government feels unsafe it creates tensions to the aegean but how exactly is this going to help by this i mean you know a few more high-tech frigates that greece is going to buy from france using what more debt uh you mentioned that you know i was a finance minister at the height of the greek debt crisis well let me stated for the records that back then when every newspaper in the world including the united states was covered with articles about the greek crisis our debt to gdp ratio was something like 170 150 170 percent right one and a half times our national income today it's more than twice it's 210 212 12 and still they're boring more money from the europeans to buy european frigates to pacify macron in terms of what he lost in the pacific while both the pacific and the aegean oceans and seas are becoming less secure and more prone to conflicts that will only have victims amongst the working classes of china of australia of the united states of greece of turkey or france and germany finally honest if you can say why you called your new book another now because i'm a leftist and we leftists have a problem amy especially those of us who declare to be critical of capitalism or against capitalism because the obvious question that then comes what is thrown at us is and it's a fair question mate if you don't like capitalism what's the alternative how could we have organized society the economy polity the whole thing differently without capitalism so i decided to write a novel a science fiction novel a political science fiction novel in which i imagined that the 2008 great financial collapse led to not just occupy wall street but to a global movement that uh with some degree of realism built another now we want to thank you for being with us we're going to ask you to stay so we can have a further conversation about another now and post it at democracynow.org giannis varafakas member of the greek parliament former finance minister of greece his latest feasts for jacobin will link to angela merkel was bad for europe and the world his new book is titled another now and that does it for our show happy birthday to paul powell democracy now currently accepting applications for two positions director finance administration and human resources manager i'm amy goodman with juan gonzalez stay safe

Channel: Democracy Now!

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Length: 18min 25sec (1105 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 29 2021