Yanis Varoufakis reflects on the 10th anniversary of Greece’s NO referendum—on betrayal, resistance, and the fight that must continue.

Hello, I am Yanis Varoufakis with a message from me and DiEM25, today, the 5th of July 2025, exactly 10 years after the Greek people voted overwhelmingly in a referendum to say a big, beautiful NO to the Big Business and Big Finance who, through their centre right and centre left political representatives, were demanding of the Greek people that they shoulder the costs of the banking crisis which Big Business and Big Finance had caused, with the result that hundreds of millions of people in Europe and America were crushed under mountain ranges of banking losses which governments then turned into public debt, before shifting it to the shoulders of the weakest of citizens through universal austerity – the working classes, the poor, the elderly, the young, the women, people who lacked the power to defend themselves from the powerful plucking the very moneytree whose existence they denied.

The Day Democracy Was Betrayed

Churchill once said of the battle of El Alamein that before it the Allies had never won but that after it they never lost again. I could say something similar about that splendid and, at once, tragic day, of the Greek No Referendum ten years ago today – the day when 62% of Greek voters ignored the financial terrorism of the European Central Bank – which had shut down the Greek banks to blackmail voters to accept the terms of surrender they were dictating to the Greek people. That same day when my former comrade, the PM I was serving as finance minister on behalf of the Greeks who were resisting, trashed their verdict and defected to the Big Finance and the Big Business in the name of the left.

From Defiance to Defeat — A Turning Point for Europe

Before that day, before the magnificent NO Referendum outcome of 5th July 2015, and during the months and years leading to it, we could not imagine losing in the long run our fights against the Big Finance and the Big Business that blew up our social economies in 2008. But after it, since the PM I was serving under overturned our people and betrayed their referendum verdict, we cannot imagine winning ever again, at least not in our lifetimes, against the Big Finance and the Big Business whom the betrayal of the NO Referendum helped recover. It was that significant a day. It was that significant a defection.

The Cost of Silence Among Comrades

Now, I know it is not the done thing to sully the spirit of one’s fellow travellers, one’s comrades, to say things like that. To surrender in public to the admission not only of the size of our defeat but also of the possibility that we may not win again for the foreseeable future. Alas, now is the time for honesty – for without honesty amongst rebels no rebellion worth its salt can be staged.

Facing Reality Without Losing Hope

Indulge me friends, fellow travellers, comrades. My point is not to bring you down. My point is to acknowledge where we are not just in Greece, in Germany, in Britain, in Europe but globally. To take stock properly of our situation globally not to mourn nor for some perverted sense of inverted glory, certainly not for gain, but for the simple, stubborn hope of rising again.

War, Austerity, and the Collapse of the Peace Movement

Somewhere to the North of where I am talking you from, the killing fields of Ukraine are devouring lives with a ruthless, mechanical precision. Where is the Peace Movement to stop this? Nowhere really. Instead Europe is sinking fast into Military Keynesianism, with large majorities in our parliaments voting for unspeakable amounts of new debt to go to weapons of mass destruction we neither need nor can afford – and certainly weapons that people with the slightest of sense left in their hearts and minds should not want.

Genocide in Palestine — And Global Indifference

Meanwhile, needless to say, from my southeast, from the scorched land of Palestine, the acrid stench of genocide drifts on the wind. Yes, we have staged magnificent marches on our streets. Yes, our people have marched to Gaza, other comrades risked life and limb to sail to that coastal war crime scene. Yes we have made it possible to speak of the genocide without being treated as buffoons. Yes, we have shifted public opinion. But, nothing is changing on the ground where Palestinian life is eradicated at a steady, at an unbearable rate, or in the corridors of power.

Where are the sanctions on Israel? Where is the UN Peacekeeping force that should have been parachuted in to stop the genocide in its tracks? Nowhere. The only people that are hounded are people like the UN’s Special Rapporteur, my friend Francesca Albanese, for daring to report on the political economy of genocide. Why has Brazil, Spain or Ireland, countries whose governments have been supportive of the Palestinians not joined the Hague Group that our Progressive International has brought together to isolate Israel? What are they waiting for?

Who Is Winning — And Why We’re Losing

Friends, fellow-travellers, comrades, at the risk of saddening, maybe even angering you, I shall say it again: Since that No referendum was overturned ten years ago, today, by the left’s own leadership, we are losing at every front. Who is winning? Not the liberal authoritarian establishment – Emmanuel Macron, Keir Starmer, Friedrich Merz. No the pro-genocide radical centre they sensationally unpopular. Even if they are clinging onto power for the time being, they are thoroughly discredited, despised even.

The Smell of Fascism in the Air

No, the winners nest elsewhere in even uglier echelons of the political spectrum. Have you not smelled it? Can’t you smell the fascism in the air? Can’t you feel its sour, metallic taste clinging to the back of your throat?

What Happened to Our Hopes?

What happened to our great hopes? Remember Woman-Life-Freedom? The whispered three-word promise Kurdish heroines carried like a fragile beacon in their hands, a promise that until recently seemed to shimmer just within reach? Well, take a look at the triumphant Donald Trump on the one hand – yes, he is winning on every front – and the pathetic Kamalah Harris, or the even more pathetic Hillar Clinton, on the other. Between them, willingly in Trump’s case, they created the manosphere’s unyielding juggernaut, which trampled upon the three little words, as if Woman-Life-Freedom, these precious little words, had never been spoken at all.

The Rise of the Tech-Oligarchy and Ecocide

Authoritarianism, that most insidious of plagues, has crept into every sinew of life. Along with the smell of pollution in the air, microplastics in our oceans, the insidious power of cloud capital hardwired into our brains, delivering our minds to the whims of our new techlords – this New Global Ecocidal Hyper-Exploitative Ruling Class is entrenching itself as the new order, its cold grip tightening with each passing day.

Political Futility — and the Refusal to Surrender

I don’t know about you but, speaking personally, on this, the 10th anniversary of our Great Victory which was turned overnight into the Great Betrayal, it is ever so easy to surrender to the feeling, the sensation, that my political struggles, fuelled by a fierce and unyielding hope, are taking me from one defeat to the next, making me feel like a character in some twisted simulation, doomed to repeat the same futile actions over and over.

Learning from the Betrayal — Grounding the Next Fight

BUT, I shall not surrender. And nor will you. Acknowledging our defeats, the overwhelming strength of the monsters in power, and the magnitude of the task, needs to be done so that we ground our disobedience, our activism, our sacred campaigns for Humanity and for Nature, on solid ground. So that we learn from the past, from what happened to my brave people 10 years ago to this day, focussing with laser sharp precision not only on the economics and the politics of what needs to be done but, much more so, on the greatest solvent, the ugliest enemy, of solidarity: The tendency of our own side, our own comrades, to be lured by power into defecting to the other side – to the oligarchs who are ever so eager to coopt us, to coopt our leading figures especially.

Ten Years Later: Still Saying NO

So, on behalf of DiEM25, today, the 5th of July 2025, exactly 10 years after the Greek people’s majestic, betrayed, but inspiringly courageous NO – that ethereal revolutionary little word – a word redolent of the only Freedom that matters, the freedom to turn down exploitative, extractive deals – On this day, I bid you farewell.

Battle well, and let us all, grounded on facts, work joyously to devise acts that make the fascists, the radical centre, the genocide practitioners and the purveyors of all types of exploitation lose their sleep at night so that the many can dream again.

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