 My next guest is launching his own global counter-movement while also running to become a member of the European Parliament. Yannis Varoufakis is the former Greek Finance Minister who resigned in 2015 amid contentious debt negotiations at the time with the EU, and he's joining me now from Athens. Yannis Varoufakis, welcome to the program. Thank you, Christiane. So, you know, I brought up 2015 and it seemed that you couldn't go a day without hearing about Brexit and a potential Greek default and chaos in your land and across Europe and reverberating all over the world. And here we are, nearly four years later. Brexit is in chaos, but it's happening. These populist and extreme waves of nationalism that you were talking about back then seem to be the order of the day way beyond Greece. I mean, you were pretty prescient back then. Well, Christiane, in 2008, we, our generation, experienced our version of 1929. It began in Wall Street, just like in 1929, and very soon the world sees to make sense in terms of what was conventional wisdom up until very recently. We, well, our regimes, our liberal establishment, to put it this way, just like the Weimar Republic in the 1920s, pretended that business could continue as usual. Of course, the major fortlines in finance made it essential in order to pretend that business could continue as usual to shift pain, loss, debt onto the shoulders of the weakest of citizens, especially in the European Union, but also in the United States. And very soon you had this content, and that discontent begot political monsters, both in Europe and in the United States. So, political monsters, some, you know, people would potentially describe the extreme right and the extreme left as being these sort of political monsters, if you like, at least they're gobbling up any sense of a centrist future, any sense that you can even find a majority for anything and a consensus to make policy. So, you have described the threat from this nationalism and this populism, and you are launching DM-25, which you hope to be a progressive international, a progressive wave to counter this mostly extreme right nationalism. Can you explain how you plan to do that and what is DM-25? Well, DM-25 is an acronym for the Democracy in Europe Movement, but we are also using, you know, the Exaltation Carpe Diem sees the day because we need to see the day. As you can see in Europe, we have a domino effect or takeovers of our polities by extremists of the right xenophobes who are exploiting the discontent and the anger in order to turn against one pride nation against another, to turn Italians against the Roma against migrants and so on. So, we need to see the day. But allow me just to put it very simply. What we are trying to do is to take one brilliant idea from Franklin Roosevelt's administration in 1933 from the New Deal. And that simple idea is to utilize, to find smart ways of utilizing existing idle cash, idle money, savings that are not being invested into productive, useful things for humanity, into the good quality jobs that can uniquely quell the discontent caused by the fact that most people can see that their children are not going to have as good a life as they did. And press this idle cash into service in order for green transition, green technologies, green energy, green transport systems. That basic idea which in a sense allowed the United States in 1933 onwards to avoid the decline of Europe, the degeneration of Europe at the same time into a kind of fascist equilibrium. That is an idea that we want to salvage from that period to bring it to Europe and indeed to internationalize it if we can so as to counter at an internationalist level both the failures of the globalization Davos, if you want, establishment that caused the crisis of 2008 and the political representation of the extremists who are now taking over one country after the other. Okay, so let's take one country after the other. Let's start with France where we've seen the most violent manifestation of this discontent. And you have what many in the liberal, democratic, sort of moderate kind of center saw as a beacon of hope the election of President Macron who defeated precisely the voice of nationalism and extremism Marine Le Pen on the right and Melanchon on the left. And now we've had these massive and violent protests and we simply don't know even whether the president's backsliding is going to placate them. What is it that, first of all, do you agree with this demonstration of discontent? And what will it take? Because they want something that sounds very counter-positional. They want more social services, more health from the state and less taxes. How does this progressive wave that you envision work in the face of these demands? Well, I think it is important to answer that question using what President Macron has himself said not very recently, but before he moved to the Elysée when he was still a candidate. I remember Emmanuel Macron very vividly saying that there have to be reforms in France but at the very same time unless we have a federalist reform of the eurozone of the way the European Union is conducting its business unless there is a common budget, a federal treasury of sorts in Europe. Unless we have a proper banking union so that we end these pretends that we can have national banking systems without treasuries that can actually do that which the US Treasury is doing in salvaging them. He himself, President Macron, predicted that without these moves towards federalism, towards a kind of serious eurozone reform, the center cannot hold. And the European Union, he said, would be dismantled. That was Emmanuel Macron. He gets elected and he puts forward an agenda for eurozone reforms which was very moderate and quite sensible. But the way in which he tried to carry out was a two-phase negotiation with Berlin. Phase one, he would Germanize France, especially the labor market and the national budget and then go to Mrs. Merkel and say, okay, now I've Germanized France. Let's have a federal eurozone. That failed. It was a colossal miscalculation on his part because he Germanized France. He introduced austerity to the national budget. He made it easier for employers to fire workers. He increased taxes for the poor and reduced them for the rich. And then when he put forward the proposals for reforming the eurozone, which for him were absolutely essential, necessary prerequisites, Mrs. Merkel said nine and very soon after that she lost power. So the explanation lies in the narrative of Mr. Macron himself. The center is not holding because we are not consolidating the European Union's economy the way that even Mr. Macron who is more moderate than I am in his politics had specified as absolutely necessary. So let me put the little devil's advocate then to you because some economists do believe that some of the reforms he did put forth have actually produced results, the labor reforms and others. And the question here is that some also saw not a galloping French economy but a move towards the French economy doing a little bit better and predictions that it would continue to do better if the reforms continue. The same in Germany, a still galloping economy. In Britain, the economy doing really, really well in the United States. The economy is doing actually really, really well. And yet this malaise and yet this rebellion against the governments whose economies are doing well for them. So if this is the result when the economies are going well what happens when they go really badly if that seems to be the... If you predict that to be potentially the case down the line? Well, I think the key to understanding what's going on and answering your question is to look at these economies and manage to discern the fact that they're not uniform. You talked about Germany. Germany is indeed swimming in cash. It is swimming in surpluses. Everybody seems to be having surpluses. The federal government is in surplus. There is a majestic, gigantic trade surplus that Donald Trump is targeting. There are corporations that are saving money and there are households that have savings. And yet, Christian, and yet... And this is a great paradox which I think answers your question. Half of the German population are far worse off today than they were 15 years ago. Similarly, you spoke about France and the reforms. Yes, it is true that Macron made business easier to conduct in France. But at the same time he introduced austerity which was effectively exported from countries like Greece into France and that created whole regions in France that resemble Greece, in other words, areas of a great depression. And it is in those areas that the movement of the Gilles Jaunes, the yellow vests, emerged before descending upon the streets of Paris. You mentioned the United Kingdom. Well, why did Brexit succeed? It did not succeed because of some deep antipathy towards the EU. It succeeded because a very large percentage of the population were being treated or felt that they were being treated like cattle that had lost their market value. They felt discarded. They felt completely disenfranchised from a London-based economy which was, as you said, expanding very rapidly while large sections of the population and of the country were being left or held behind. This is the issue here. Divisions within our countries and between our countries growing while statistics at a macro level seeming to be prospering. So you have, effectively, national statistics that are prospering and large proportions of the population that are being discarded. Okay, so now let me put this notion of division and nationalism and populism to you in this context. Steve Bannon, President Trump's election campaign genius with who helped him win the election, has, as you know, been in Europe trying to round up all these extreme-right nationalist parties and elements into what he called the movement to contest, most particularly, the upcoming European elections in May of next year. This is what he says about his movement. The beating heart of the globalist project is in Brussels. By driving the state through the vampire, the whole thing will start to dissipate. We'll call it the movement or the cause or something like that. Everything converges on May of 2019, and that's literally when we take over the EU. That is pretty frank and rather chilling talk, actually, from a guy who's got a proven track record of getting a president elected with some of those views. Are you concerned or do you see your movement as going up directly against his movement? Listening to Steve Bannon sends a shiver down my spine because while nobody can accuse me of being uncritical towards Brussels and the European Union, this disintegrationist nationalist narrative is what is going to lead to a great deal of pain being inflicted upon a majority of people in a majority of countries in Europe. This coalescence of nationalists is working towards disintegrating the European Union in a way that will only bring into power strongmen like Mr. Salvini in Italy, like Mr. Kurtz in Austria, like Mrs. Le Pen in France, the result being a dystopia, the result being a genuine post-modern version of the 1930s. And yes, DiEM25, our Democracy in Europe movement, while being very critical of the European establishment, we're going to fight Mr. Steve Bannon in every realm with a pan-European humanist narrative, one that seeks to bring together the peoples of Europe, not to divide them and to disintegrate them. So I wonder whether you think that you will succeed, whether you are optimistic about the challenge you have at hand. And particularly, I want to ask you about one of the biggest rallying calls and cries to these nationalists is the issue of immigration. And, you know, the Hungarian foreign minister talked to me about this. I mean, they just do not want practically anybody except for white Christians to come in. And, you know, the UN migration charter pretty much failed in Marrakech with all the relevant countries sort of pulling out and refusing to sign on. And the United States not even sitting at the table. Listen to what the Hungarian foreign minister said about this central issue to me when we spoke in September. My question is, what is the legal or immoral ground for anyone to cross, to violate a border between two peaceful countries? These people came through Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, all peaceful and safe countries. So it's not a fundamental human right that you wake up in the morning, you pick a country where you would like to live in, like Germany or Sweden. And in order to get there, you violate series of borders. This is not the way it should work out. So, I mean, there's a lot to question there, but nonetheless, you get his point. What does your movement seek to do to address the fear and loathing around migration today? Well, isn't it interesting? I will recall that Hungary was a communist country and lots of Hungarian Democrats fled the country and sought refuge by crossing borders. They sought refuge in Europe. And indeed, when the regime collapsed, we opened up our borders to Hungarians, to the Czechs, to the Slovaks and so on. That is the fundamental basis of a democratic Europe that we feel stronger when we bring border fences down, not when we erect them. Europe does not have a problem with migration. Europe has a problem with austerity, with a failed economy, with a failed economic system. And let me remind you something else which I think is of interest. Hungary has no refugees. Hungary has very few migrants. In my country, which is already suffering a monumental economic collapse, we have tens and hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants. You do not have an anti-immigration feeling in this country, but you asked me whether I'm optimistic. Christian, I do believe very strongly that when it comes to politics, when it comes to fighting for democratic rights and for humanism, we don't have the right to issue predictions. We have a moral right to do what is right and then simply to expect that hope is going to be the fuel that drives the success in the end. We will be watching. Janis Varoufakis, thank you so much for joining us from Athens.