Yanis Varoufakis, the leftwing firebrand who briefly served as Greece’s finance minister, has criticised his “ridiculous prosecution” for allegedly promoting the use of recreational drugs after his public admission that he once took an ecstasy pill almost 40 years ago.
The 64-year-old, who reminisced about the experience on a podcast, was charged on Wednesday with “inciting others in the illegal use of narcotics”. If convicted he faces a prison term of at least six months and up to €500,000 (£440,000) in fines. A court hearing has been scheduled for December.
On Friday, Varoufakis described the indictment as indicative of the far-right turn in politics across the west.
“My ridiculous prosecution must be seen within the wider, west-wide surge of an insidious new form of fascism,” he wrote on X, highlighting what he claimed was the appointment of “neo-fascists” to top posts in the centre-right Greek government.
“In this context, I am honoured by their determination to persecute me – as it grants me the privilege of calling upon people of good conscience, from around the world, to stand together, to oppose them.”
He accused Greece’s prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis of “cutting a deal” with the far right to ensure that, unlike elsewhere in Europe, extremists did not form their own party. In prominent ministerial positions, he said, they were then able to “use their authority to appeal to their electoral base by ensuring … that people like myself are harassed and dragged through the courts”.
Varoufakis, an economics professor widely seen on the European left as Greece’s most vociferous public intellectual, spoke candidly about his own brush with drugs on the podcast in January. Although his small leftwing party, MeRA25, narrowly failed to cross the threshold into parliament in elections in June 2023, he holds particular appeal among young voters disillusioned with mainstream politics.
Asked if he had ever used drugs, he recalled an incident in Sydney in 1989 when, after a Mardi Gras parade, he had taken ecstasy during a Kylie Minogue concert. “I’m not like Bill Clinton who ‘did not inhale’. I inhaled,” he said. “I took ecstasy once. It was an amazing experience until a few days later when I had an incredible migraine … I remember dancing 15 to 16 hours, as if nothing had happened, but then I suffered for a week and never took it again.”
He went on to admit that he was still partial to “grass, but I can’t find it, and no one will give it to me”.
Critics, including TV show hosts, lashed out at the politician, accusing him of abusing his status as a role model. However, he is not the first public figure in Greece to have spoken out about recreational drug use.
The former mayor of Athens, Kostas Bakoyannis, who is Mitsotakis’s nephew, confessed in a TV interview in 2017 to smoking hashish, adding, with a laugh, that he had felt the urge to do it at family gatherings. Artists and scientists have also spoken publicly about drug use. None, however, have been prosecuted as a result.
As the row has deepened, so has support for Varoufakis.
Charalampos Poulopoulos, widely considered Greece’s pre-eminent drug abuse expert, told the Guardian the remarks were not only an expression of opinion and, as such, “a constitutionally guaranteed right”, but fell far short of promoting illegal substances and inciting others to take them.
“Several times in the past, public figures have talked about their experience with substance use in their youth without it being considered a criminal offence,” said Poulopoulos, now professor of social work in addictions at the University of West Attica. “His comments are clearly being exploited today to cultivate political fear on the basis of a fabricated risk around the spread of drugs. If convicted, he’ll become a hero. This very surprising prosecution neither serves the common good, nor public interest.”
Until laws were amended more than a decade ago, Greece had some of the toughest anti-drug legislation in Europe. In a society both socially conservative and often late to trends, heavy drug use arrived with the debt-stricken country’s economic crisis in 2010 when unemployment and poverty began to soar.
Varoufakis took over as finance minister in 2015 as Greece’s struggle to keep bankruptcy at bay intensified shortly after a radical leftwing government assumed power.
In a statement MeRA25 vowed to tackle the issue of addiction with “a modern scientific approach and not with gendarmerie-style attitudes from the 1950s”.
Varoufakis has, meanwhile, pledged to continue speaking the language of truth in a society he claims is awash with “hypocrisy and cocaine”.
