Greece’s outspoken former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis said that he will not support SYRIZA and Alexis Tsipras in the upcoming elections, but he hopes they will remain friends.
Speaking to CNBC on Friday morning, Varoufakis said he doesn’t believe in the third bailout program Greece has signed and he cannot support the party that signed the deal. “I can’t look my voters in the eyes and tell them to support a failed policy,” he said.
Regarding his work with Tsipras, Varoufakis said: “I wish him the best and I continue to consider him a friend. I hope our friendship remains, despite our political differences. If that doesn’t happen, then we would have failed on a human level.”
When asked about the now infamous Plan B, Varoufakis replied that he never planned to pull Greece out of the euro nor did the Greek government. “We couldn’t do that. What we could do though, was to formulate a plan that would give us a “breathing” period of liquidity inside the euro when the Europeans would decide to close our banks. And that’s what we did,” he said.
Varoufakis said that in essence Plan B was preparing for the worst case scenario. “We had to be prepared for the worst. Not that we wished for the worst to come.”
The former minister blamed creditors for their hard stance. “The other side did not want a viable solution. They wanted to deprive us of liquidity and we tried to form a plan that would increase liquidity in order to stay in the euro, not to leave the euro. Under that plan, when the banks would close, we would survive for a reasonable period of time so that negotiations would recommence.”
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