In this interview by Chris Becker, DiEM25 co-founder Yanis Varoufakis and MERA25’s Melanie Schweizer discuss values, the duality of DiEM25 and MERA25, and Europe’s troubling descent into fascism during their visit to Munich for the Munich Peace Rally

What are your values, Melanie?

MS: Peace, freedom, self-determination, equality, and justice are really important values for me.

And for you, Yanis?

YV: Similarly, the values that the Enlightenment was supposed to convey, but which our European and North American establishment has betrayed.

And truly, in the name of freedom they have created slavery, in the name of peace they’ve created war, in the name of solidarity they’ve created discrimination.

Yanis, in April 2024 you had been issued a ban with a “Betätigungsverbot” [ban on political activity] and barred from stepping on German soil after you were intending to speak on the Palestine Congress, which was shut down by police.

Is there a discrepancy between your values and the values of German authorities?

YV: Because I grew up in a fascist, right-wing dictatorship, and because of the influence of my mum and my dad, who were very great admirers of the social democratic tradition of Willy Brandt and Bruno Kreisky, I had this view of Germany as a place that had learned the lessons of the past and had become a genuine beacon of democracy.

To compare that childish view of mine with the reality of creeping fascism and this obscene hypocrisy of supposedly caring about antisemitism, when all they care about is supporting genocide, of caring about preserving the democratic order, when they have themselves utterly and perfectly usurped it.

This is the worst combination of hypocrisy and authoritarianism, what we see in not just the German state, but the German polity. And that includes parts of the former left.

You’re implying that on the one side there is a promotion of specific values by the German polity, but at the same time they’re not really put into reality.

YV: No, I don’t imply.

I scream it from the rooftops. That we have hypocrisy galore.

Melanie, you have been temporarily exempted from your position as an adviser in the Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs due to “internal investigations” after Bild-Zeitung started a smear campaign, accusing you of anti-Semitism.
Are the authorities reflecting your values of justice and equality in your opinion?

MS: In my case, as well, there is a discrepancy between my personal values and the ones of Germany authorities; one hundred, if not two hundred percent.

I don’t recognise this country anymore, I don’t recognise what I’ve been taught and brought up with, my socialisation, my history, you know. I think I feel betrayed as in how I was taught never again, and it is again.

And it is again done by the media, by the politicians. What the current state of Germany is showing is that not all lives are equal and that some are valued more, that international law does not apply to everyone and that constitutional rights also do not apply to everyone, it depends on your nationality, ethnicity, colour of your skin, how many rights you have in this country.

My core values are equality and justice and I cannot breathe with this.

How do you cope with your personal situation at the moment?

MS: I cope with it by being active, by joining MERA25, by becoming a political activist, and not just that, but also by trying to form alliances, international movements.

I think we have to fight this. I feel compelled to speak up when things go wrong, when I feel that there is oppression, that goes against the weak. And while silence is complicity and we have to find ways to join forces, to become stronger, to become more efficient.

This is actually my coping mechanism, because everything else makes me paralysed and depressed. I think that’s also what the system wants us to be. They want us to believe that we cannot change things, but we can.

Next to MERA25, there’s also DiEM25, a “pan-European, progressive movement that aims to democratise Europe by overthrowing the oligarchy”. What is the purpose of a movement, and how does it relate to the party MERA25?

YV: DiEM25 is a movement that sprang out of the euro crisis and the imposition of austerity across Europe. At the time when European capitalism and European banking was crashing and all the burdens were falling on the shoulders of the weakest of Europeans, beginning in Greece but ending up in Germany.

Initially, the idea was that we progressives form a pan-European, transnational movement the same way that bankers and fascists do. Not just international, but transnational in the sense that we become members of it, not members of a Greek branch, a German branch, a French branch in order to move beyond the nation-state as the organising principle.

The original idea was not to run in elections, but rather to bring together many different forces, movements, grassroots organisations as well as political parties in that context.

That failed. We did succeed initially to bring a very broad coalition together beginning at the Volksbühne on the 9th of February 2016 in Berlin, including Podemos, people from Greece, from Britain, from Ireland and so on. But once we distilled our collective program in what we call the Green New Deal for Europe, then nobody wanted to run with it in the elections. So we thought, “In that case, we will do that ourselves”. So DiEM25 created electoral vehicles, electoral wings, which we call the MERA25. “Mera” is the Greek word for DiEM, as in “carpe diem”, which translates to “seize the day”.

The importance of having a movement is that it goes beyond the ballot box, it goes beyond campaigning to get elected, to try to influence the political process through parliamentarianism.

I believe in a duality of having a movement, where you can be a member of that movement independently or of an electoral organisation. This has worked rather well.

Because otherwise, if you go straight into the political parties, then you end up fragmenting along the lines of nation states. The Greek part, the German part, and so on. So, what holds us together is equal membership, absolutely solidaristic in its nature of a common transnational movement.

MS: DiEM25 is the backbone of MERA25, it gives ideology, ideas and passion and political theory that other parties don’t have anymore.
Volt doesn’t even bother to have a real program. The only signs I see of them is when they’re saying, we will bring you back to the future. What does that mean?
Or the Greens: they’re putting a picture of Habeck or Baerbock, which says “Together”. That’s an insult to the people who are their voters. It doesn’t say anything. Really, this is how you campaign? With empty words?

This is what makes MERA25 so strong, and why we are being so marginalised by media, because they know that we would threaten potentially the establishment, what other parties will not do and have never done. They are part and parcel of the same system. They just give them different colours, but in the end they’re all the same. They don’t really want to go against the root cause of the dysfunction of our system.

Yanis, in your book, Another Now, you are talking about a utopia that overcomes both techno-feudalism as well as capitalism to some extent. In this utopia, you mention “techno-rebels”, groups that were able to trigger a change towards an ideal society, both on the political as well as on the economic level. You call these groups e.g., Solsourcers, Bladerunners or Crowdshorters, who use the logic of financialised capitalism against itself in order to create a system that is based in cooperatives.

Is DiEM25 intended to offer a platform for these “techno-syndicalist” groups as well?

YV: Ideally. All my life I tried to avoid answering the question, how would a cooperative, socialist society, a collective type of an organised society, work? If you don’t like capitalism, what would you like to put in its place? Who would run the shops, the banks, the money that we have in our pockets and so on?

The reason why I was trying to avoid that was because it was just too difficult.

Karl Marx never answered the question of what communism would look like. He skilfully avoided the question. But there came a time when it was impossible to avoid it.

So, I sat down and I wrote Another Now as a, I don’t think of it as a utopia, and I tried not to make it a utopia. I was highlighting the weaknesses of that system that I was designing, because this is the only way of dialectically interrogating your own self. It was kind of an exercise.

And then of course once you write down your ideas of how an ideal society should be working, then the question is how would you get there? What would be the revolutionary force that brings it about? A theory of change.

The groups that you mentioned were part of the chapter in the book, in this science fiction book effectively, in which I was trying to envisage what kind of revolutionary organisations might bring about that kind of ideal society. So yes, in one word, ideally.

I would like DiEM25, the Progressive International, whatever it is that we create in this really existing world, to bring about this change.

As we are here in Munich during the Munich Security Conference in a very volatile and destabilised political atmosphere, do you think that this is a good time to bring in this kind of change, Melanie?

MS: I think it has always been the perfect time for MERA25 and DiEM25. I think now, of course, it’s more important than ever. But basically, we need hope, and we need to give people hope.

We need to give people causes to fight for. And for that, for sure, it’s the perfect time, because we are seeing a negative down spiral into warmongering, into preparing us to become a society for war and violence and fascism.

And this is what fascism is, right? Legitimising violence and crimes if they are politically opportune. And that’s what is happening at the moment. We need a strong and fierce voice that is telling the people, you can speak up, and you are not alone.

People don’t care if they are getting criminalised and doxxed, and they will still keep speaking up. And I think this is what empowers other people. Maybe not immediately, but maybe after a few days, maybe after a few weeks, maybe at some later point they will join.

These people need a home. All of us, who don’t feel represented, need a political home.

For my part, I don’t feel represented by anyone in this parliament. I don’t even feel German anymore. Because this is not a culture that I can tolerate.

As a candidate for MERA25 Germany, how do you communicate to people that MERA25 is the political home people are looking for?

MS: I am not trying to convince people to do the right thing. I think people should be convinced by themselves. And I am trying to do the right thing for myself.

That’s also all I can do. For myself, this is the path I have to take. It so important for myself personally in order to be able to look myself into the mirror and to say, I didn’t go with the masses.

And I think people will see by themselves. If we are enthusiastic about our cause and about that we really think a better world is possible, a more just world, another now, a world where people are actually equal and where there is no racism, where there is no exploitation. People will be convinced just because we believe in it. And if we don’t believe in it, then who should believe in it?

At the same time, there are a lot of progressive and left leaning people who do follow a different kind of logic when they take a ballot. In their view, the situation is already politically so dire that they seek to prevent strong right-wing parties at all costs. As a result, they decide to vote for the Greens, for Die Linke or for the SPD. Melanie, what is your perspective on such a tactical voting strategy?

MS: Who has brought us here into the doorstep of fascism were Die Linke, the SPD, the Greens. That was the centre left parties. This government in Germany is the most leftist government that we had in decades. They have introduced the most authoritarian policies that we have had so far. They have done more damage than CDU maybe, for example.

Of course, it could get worse after the elections. But we are already in this situation now and it’s already bad. We have seen that it doesn’t really matter who is in this parliament. The rules are not made really by the parties and the politicians. They are made by the lobbyists and the economic elites. Therefore, we have to put a sign there. We have to resist in all ways possible.

Of course, it’s an act of resistance to vote for a party that is not in the parliament. To show them actually we are here, the people are here. And we will not follow your game of playing people against each other.

Yanis, how do you think should MeRA25 and DiEM25 convince people who are less politicised and are voting in more tactical terms?

YV: With great difficulty, is the honest answer. But it is important to keep trying.

I separate the two, the less political from the tactical voters, who tend to be political.

The less political, this is our great task. Because this is the majority now.

The majority is apathetic, you can see that. I’m not sure what’s going to happen in the German federal election now, but across Europe, abstention rates rise, disaffection with all of politics, which is of course a great boost for fascism, is on the rise.

I think that conviction politics is the way to go. The apolitical, or the ones who tend towards abstention, loathe above all else the hypocrisy of politicians who say one thing and mean another, who don’t believe what they say and say what they don’t believe in, who flip-flop, who once they get into power suddenly become unrecognisable. We have to remain in an honest dialogue with these people.

We have to admit our weaknesses. We have to admit the weakness of bourgeois democracy and the parliamentary process. It sucks, but there is no alternative.

And we need to stop living in fear of the truth. The Trumpists, the right-wingers are far more authentic in the sense that they are raw. So we have to be raw, except we need to be telling it as our values inspire us to.

Regarding the tactical voters, essentially, what you describe in your question is the logic of the least bad outcome. Well, mathematically speaking, if you are constantly voting for the least bad, then on average the situation becomes worse, because everything shifts more and more to the right.

After 1929, you had the collapse of the financial sector, beginning in Wall Street, and then after that very slowly you had the steady path towards fascism.

Exactly the same has been happening after 2008, our generation’s mid-war period. In this steady path towards the right and the ultra-right, by definition the centre of gravity of electoral politics is going to be shifted to the right.

So, if you adopt the least bad logic, then you must always vote, every day, a little bit more to the right. So, before you know it, you are yourself in the clasps of fascism.

Have we already overstepped this boundary towards fascism, in your opinion?

YV: There is no doubt that the Social Democrats, the Greens, Die Linke in this country, and the equivalents in my country, have fallen into the bosom of the ultra-right, of the oligarchy. They even know it. But caught in that trap, they don’t know what to do.

They don’t have the honesty to admit it. They don’t have the courage to try to escape from it. They don’t even have the optimism that they will win in any way, by staying trapped the way they are.

That’s why they are so pathetically miserable.

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