Controversial in the very least. I also got the impression that he was quite anti-EU with his whole Greece rhetoric during the discussions about another Greek buyout. Maybe I got him wrong..?
How could he not be? The people he was negotiating with to try and save Greece were telling him - look, we know you’re right, but we’re going to completely ignore that fact and institute policy that completely fucks the worst off Greeks.
From the talk he appears everything but anti-EU. If you carefully listen to him, what he aims at is a federal-EU. He also justify the collapse of high-balance-deficit countries with the fact everyone is in the Eurozone. Therefore fuelling the borrow of capital that won’t be repaid, until bankruptcy.
The guy is a jerk. He fucked up in an unprecedented way, his whole negotiation strategy was just a blackmail toward EU-Germany that eventually backfired. In the meantime all his proposals for reforming the public sector were laughable, like the idea of giving cameras to tourists to record tax evading shops.
He may be good at writing books or giving lectures but he was a complete disaster as minister of finance.
Not sure about that. He was trying to get the best deal for Greece, Germany called his bluff and he was left holding the bag, but he had the right intentions. In retrospect he probably should have gone with the Grexit. The Germans would have capitulated, and, had they not, you’d still be better off.
Maybe downvoted because of the language, but the comment is accurate. The guy is a megalomaniac, who negotiated for Greece without ANY skin in the game.
Here is an interview that explains his position a bit better than my paraphrasing: https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/07/yanis-varoufak...