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After a disastrous result in the recent EU Parliamentary election for his newly formed party, Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s former controversial Finance Minister made a plea for votes in an ANA interview published on Sunday.

“Only a vote for MeRA25 and the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) is a vote of resistance to the 4th memorandum. And of these two parties, only MeRA25 is a European-wide party that will resist not just by saying ‘no’ but also by proposing alternative and technocratically sound solutions to New Democracy’s toxic and classist legislation,” said the leader of MeRA25, Yanis Varoufakis.

“Even if all of us at MeRA25 voted for SYRIZA, New Democracy would still come first because the people punish every Prime Minister that passes memorandums – even more so, one that has passed two memoranda, one in the summer of 2015 and one in the summer of 2018,” he continued.

According to Varoufakis, the only way that ND might fail to get an outright majority is if MeRA25 receives enough votes to get into parliament.

“What will SYRIZA’s MPs and [PM Alexis] Tsipras say to [ND] ministers from their seats in the main opposition: Give back the pension benefits, the trains, the airports, the surpluses? ‘But you’re the ones that took them’ they would quite reasonably reply,” Varoufakis said.

A vote for either ND or the Movement for Change (Kinima Allagis – KINAL) would simply reinforce a “ruthless oligarchy” while a vote for SYRIZA was “without any point”, he noted.

The European elections marked the end of one chapter and opened up a new one that was even worse than the one before, according to Varoufakis, where ND leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis will build “the most parasitic, profiteering oligarchy the country has ever seen” on the foundations of the fourth memorandum passed by SYRIZA in August 2018.

When asked about the criticism levelled at him for his six-month sojourn as Finance Minister and the possibility of a parliamentary inquiry into that period, Varoufakis noted that he has been asking for such an investigation since the summer of 2015 and is ready “to convert the domestic servants of the troika to the real defendants for the collapse of the country and the entrapment of the Greeks in a permanent and massive debt-slave colony. I very much fear, however, that they will not dare.”

He said MeRA25’s vision was for a European Greece that will fight to keep hydrocarbons in the ground and be a centre of technology and European networks powered exclusively by renewable energy, with decentralised production and good jobs in advanced technology, with power batteries everywhere, producing and exporting high value organic foods and having borders open to people, ideas, products and civilisations.

*Images by Nick Bourdo Photography (Copyright)