A New Movement or the Next Dud?

by Vaska

Only time will tell, of course, but here’s wishing Yannis Varoufakis and his new political project the very best of luck.  It will most certainly need as much of it as it can get.

Starting last October, with the prospects of a true left coming to power inGreece itself crushed for now by the re-election of the Tsipras-led Syriza government, the former minister of finance has been announcing the formation of a pan-European left-wing movement, to be formally inaugurated this month. Varoufakis presents his project as offering a “third way” alternative to the present, undemocratic form of the European Union as well as to the increasingly attractive option of a return to the nation-state as the authoritative sovereign political actor.  
For now, the incipient movement’s name is Democracy in Europe 2025, or DiEM 25, suggesting that Varoufakis doesn’t expect any real, substantive democracy to be available in Europe for at least another 10 years or so.   Should the EU adopt TTIP, of course, European nations will be deprived of both sovereingty and a chance at democracy for at least the next half a century, so one might expect one of Mr Varoufakis’s major goals to be the creation of an anti-TTIP mass movement to begin with.  So far, however, he has not given any indication that this will be a priority.
The movement is set to be launched in Berlin:

According to the German socialist paper Neues Deutschland, Varoufakis will be appearing at the launch along with “some of his ‘accomplices’ from all over Europe,” though the complete list of speakers has yet to be announced

Judging by his language, Varoufakis still seems to be in thrall to the bad-boy image he’s enjoyed in the Western press, a sign that doesn’t augur too well for the actual seriousness of the endeavour.  
With NATO announcing a four-fold increase in its funding for anti-Russia military installations in Europe, a move of such unprecedented aggressiveness as to have many fearing the possibility of a hot war of all-too-imaginable proportions on the European continent, what Europe needs is a massive peace-and-democracy movement capable of both forcing the EU to drop all plans for the ratification of the TTIP and of negotiating a brand new peace-and-stability agreement which will respect Russia’s security needs as much as EU’s own.  
Whether or not DiEM 25 can achieve either of these pressing goals will become a little clearer once we know who Mr Varoufakis’s “accomplices” are.

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