The 44th Greek Festival of Sydney stands as a vibrant celebration of the Greek-Australian diaspora, highlighting its rich contributions to culture, the arts, migration, multiculturalism, politics, and the ever-evolving global challenges. This year’s program featured an engaging conversation between Greece’s former Finance Minister and acclaimed author, Yanis Varoufakis, and Dr Helen Vatsikopoulos at the Teacher’s Federation Conference Centre in Surry Hills, Sydney on 6 March 2026.
An Evening of Resistance and Reflection
Coinciding with the release of Yanis Varoufakis’s latest book, Raise Your Soul: A Personal History of Resistance, the event held under the auspices of the Greek Orthodox Community of NSW, attracted a full house of 400 attendees.
Fascism was in the air – a sour, metallic taste that clung to the back of my throat. Somewhere to the north of our island home, the killing fields of Ukraine devoured lives with a ruthless, mechanical precision. Woman, Life, Freedom, the campaign by Kurdish heroines, had been trampled by the manosphere’s unyielding juggernaut, lost, as though the three little words had never been whispered at all. And from Palestine, the acrid stench of genocide drifted on the wind across the eastern Mediterranean, which grimly confirmed to me the fragility of humanity’s most solemn promises to itself.
Authoritarianism was entrenching itself as the new world order. My political struggles against it had met with three consecutive electoral defeats in the space of one year, making me feel like a doomed character in some twisted simulation.
The Solace of Writing
The title of Yanis’ latest book, which deals with the struggles of his family and the Greek nation across generations, is drawn from his mother’s plea:
“Come, come, life is ahead of us. Raise your soul now. We have much to do.”
The book was born from Varoufakis’ depression, triggered by war in Ukraine, the genocide in Palestine, and a series of political defeats in Greece and the European Parliament. “When I get depressed, I write,” he explained.
But the result is exhilaration for the reader.
The Women Who Shaped Resistance
The book is a deeply personal family memoir that unfolds through the lives of five women who have left a profound influence on his journey through life, starting with his mother (and political mentor), Eleni.
Spanning a century of Greek history, it traverses post-colonial Egypt in the 1920s, Nazi occupation, communist partisan resistance, civil war, the 1967–1974 military junta, and the modern austerity crisis. It is a moving record of the impact of women who resisted fascism, patriarchy, poverty, and despair, and how their resilience shaped Yanis Varoufakis and countless others.
As Varoufakis reminded his audience, fascism is not an abstraction but a lived experience given that his family suffered under both fascist and Nazi regimes.
His mother’s story reaches back to the 1930s. Paternal grandmother Anna, raised in Cairo and a card-carrying member of the Egyptian Feminist Union, comes alive through a red diary found by Yanis’ sister. His maternal grandmother Perseviani, who raised him, provides the lens for the Greek Civil War. Marietta, his former wife, maps the civil war’s continuation into exile and Australia. Finally, Danai Stratou, his current partner, offers the perspective of his years as finance minister, confronting the Troika and resigning.
“I ended up with a 100-year history where I, a man, am trying to see the world through these women’s eyes.”
A Boy and a Model Stuka
Yanis Varoufakis opened with a story that features early in his book.
In 1969, barely two years after the military coup in Greece, 8-year-old Yanis accompanied his mother to visit an uncle, a former Siemens CEO turned resistance fighter, being held in detention by the junta.
Uncle Panayis, in between torture and beatings by the military police, somehow managed to construct a model aeroplane out of matchsticks and scraps of paper to give to his young nephew. The model, ironically, was of a Stuka – the feared WWII German dive bomber – complete with a swastika insignia.
As the two visitors were leaving, one of the guards grabbed the plane and flung into the wall in the hope of provoking Yanis’ mother. Unperturbed, Eleni calmly picked up the broken plane and they left. Yanis eagerly took the model aeroplane home to show his father only to witness his parents cut open the fuselage to reveal a hidden piece of paper containing instructions for fellow dissidents ahead of their upcoming trials.
The Stuka had served as a decoy but Yanis Varoufakis fondly remembers his first (albeit unwitting) participation in an act of political resistance.
The Greek Civil War That Never Ended
Varoufakis’s framing of the Greek Civil War resonated with those whose families carry its wounds. He described the ‘healing’ brought by Andreas Papandreou’s 1981 election – a “commonly agreed lie” – in which medals of resistance were widely handed out, including to those not directly involved. His own father, never technically in the resistance, received one.
The symbolism worked, with subsequent governments burning secret police files and normal politics seemingly replacing old hatreds.
However, the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 reopened old fault lines. Austerity measures enforced by Berlin and Brussels, ostensibly as a bailout for Greece, revived fascism in Greek politics. Golden Dawn emerged, and to the chagrin and angst of many observers, the New Democracy government now partners with forces Varoufakis openly calls fascist.
The Fascist Playbook
Varoufakis proposed a thought experiment: imagine that Mussolini and Hitler, knowing they were about to lose the Second World War, sat down and wrote a blueprint for reviving fascism in 2025. What would it say?
As far as Varoufakis is concerned, it would include co-opting the left’s critique of finance capital, appealing to victims of neoliberalism, building coalitions between the economically dispossessed and nostalgic conservatives, and invoking a fictitious golden past. Fascist elements would control culture war ministries such as immigration and police, while economic ministries remain in centrist hands. When contradictions mount, start a war.
Varoufakis named Greece’s Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis as someone who has kept the far right inside the tent of New Democracy itself, neutralising a separate fascist party at the cost of absorbing its politics. The Ministry of Migration, he noted, went to a man who once said the only way to stop migration was with blood in the water.
The world around us
Australia, Varoufakis noted, is not immune. He criticised the Labor government’s failure to leverage its huge parliamentary majority, warning that continued drift would benefit One Nation, not the Greens. He remarked that Australian students pay more tax than the nation’s gas and petroleum industry combined.
Varoufakis critiqued Trump’s presidency, observing that although Trump campaigned on a “no war” platform, he ultimately became entangled in foreign conflicts, acting as a “puppet of Netanyahu”. According to Varoufakis, Israeli security has become synonymous with permanent insecurity, chaos, and war. The continued annexation of the West Bank, he argued, persists under the cover of ongoing conflict.
He also lamented the lack of dignity among European leaders, particularly their slow and inadequate responses to crises in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya.
Creeping authoritarianism is also on the rise, uniting the disaffected, undermining public institutions, and invoking nostalgia for a mythical past. Leaders promise peace and prosperity, but demand submission and silence in return. Varoufakis warned that this trade-off has enabled leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orban to consolidate power and marginalise dissent.
As for the direction of the current Middle East conflict, Varoufakis drew a historical parallel. He likened the spectacle of Roman emperors declaring victory after defeat to the United States’ response to recent wars, suggesting that leadership often masks reality. He noted, “The truth is infinitely mutable.”
“Our grandparents, refugees. Our parents, migrants. We, racists.”
When asked about why some second and third-generation Greeks in Australia adopt racist attitudes, Varoufakis recalled a slogan spray-painted in Syngrou Avenue in downtown Athens: “Our grandparents, refugees. Our parents, migrants. We, racists.”
This discontent stems in large part from the 2008 crisis marked by years of austerity for the many and wealth for the few, combined with weak social democracy, resulting in the rise of fascism.
Political Persecution and Defiance
The Greek State, through a cabal of far-right ideologues holding up the fascist faction within the ranks of the New Democracy government, is prosecuting Varoufakis for allegedly promoting drug use – the charge is inciting others to take illegal substances – following his ‘confession’ that he once tried an ecstasy pill at the 1989 Mardi Gras in Sydney.
Many regard this as a trumped-up (pun intended) political show trial designed to drain his energy and suppress dissent. After being served with court papers, Varoufakis declared:
“My ridiculous prosecution must be seen within the wider, West-wide, surge of an insidious new form of fascism. This has nothing to do with drugs, with the law, with anything related to my actual interview. It is a reflection of what has been happening to politics across the West, with Greek characteristics.”
But Varoufakis is not perturbed, outwardly at least. In a recent interview with journalist David Marr on the ABC Night Live program, Yanis revealed that not everyone in the Greek Government are impressed. Indeed, he is certain that the Greek Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, a neo-liberal, finds the prosecution laughable. But the far right have to be appeased and so the trial by ordeal will proceed.
And Yanis’ prediction? As he told the audience:
“I’m going to be convicted, and they will give me a fine, which I will not pay, so I may end up behind bars, and then I will be acquitted on appeal.”
Just to be irritating. And defiant to the end.
What We Do With Fear: Organising for Resistance
The evening concluded with questions about protest, fear, and the cost of dissent.
Varoufakis invoked Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous words – “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” – and emphasised the practical importance of community organising. The essential work, he argues, is for people to refuse to be afraid alone, but to stand together.
And by drawing on the generational legacy of resistance in his family, Yanis Varoufakis exhorts us to raise our souls against the dark forces of authoritarianism, fascism and xenophobia.
George Vardas is the Arts and Culture Editor.
Yanis Varoufakis’ book Raise Your Soul is available now: https://www.penguin.com.au/books/raise-your-soul-9781529970210