Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s new finance minister, has been described variously as maverick, brilliant, visionary and self-obsessed. The 53-year-old economist, who has flourished on the back of intensive commentary on Europe’s financial crisis – delivered through blogs, tweets, lectures and books – is no stranger to controversy.

Of all the economists who have united around Alexis Tsipras, the country’s new far left leader, he is by far the most confrontational. The terms attached to the bailout programmes propping up the Greek economy are tantamount to “fiscal waterboarding” he says. But he has Tsipras’s ear.

Varoufakis may well have been appointed to the new Greek government’s most sensitive post precisely because he relishes a fight. In the shaven-headed fitness addict, European finance ministers have got an opponent who will not recede easily. And one who, furthermore, appears to have the stamina of a long distance runner to go the whole way.

Even within Syriza, the radical left party which the Greek Australian now represents as an MP, there are grumbles that his views are unorthodox. Some point out that everything about him, starting with his name – contrary to Greek tradition he insists on dropping the second n in Yanis – is different. But Varoufakis, who has taught in Britain, Australia and Greece and gave up a post at the University of Texas, in Austin, to return to Athens at Tsipras’s calling, is also a star.

Although barely in the country for the past three years, he won a record 135,638 votes as a candidate in Athens’s second electoral district – by far the toughest area to contest. No other Syriza MP came close – and unlike any of them Varoufakis had been in politics for only three weeks.

Such popularity has been attributed to his agility and ability to popularise the economy for ordinary Greeks. And the plain, if tough, talk with which difficult concepts are deconstructed.

“We Greeks,” he recently wrote, “tend to make a big mistake. We think that our bad partner in the EU is Germany and our good, if weak, partner is France. That is wrong.”

Varoufakis, who has described himself as an “accidental economist”, is the first to say he is not hidebound by ideology. Greek voters may have chosen to “stop going gently into the night” by electing the anti-establishment Syriza, but no one, he says, should grow too fond of power. The spectre of overseeing negotiations with Greece’s partners is “an extremely scary project and prospect”. But, he adds, the politics of austerity have to end.

“Biblical economics, an ‘eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’, leave everybody blind and toothless,” he told Johanna Jaufer of the Austrian broadcaster ORF. He has no idea where he will be in two, three, five, 10 years. But what he does know is that Greece has to stand again and he is the man who is going to try and do it.

• This article was amended on 30 January 2015. An earlier version omitted the attribution of the quote in the final paragraph.