You are running a country that is basically bankrupt, right? And everyone is attacking and you're there trying to sort of defend basically and gain a little bit and score a few goals. Tell us about that.
Well, the bankruptcy of the country was not incidental. The only reason why we were elected and me personally was because it was bankrupt. Uh I had no intention of being a politician.
Uh I'm an economist. At some point uh I started gigging and screaming because um the most bankrupt European state was given the largest loan in the history of humanity under conditions of crashing further the incomes that were initially so low as to make it bankrupt. So you know it doesn't take much to realize that uh this is um um a violation of basic logic.
And um you know I stood with um a very clear platform personally. Uh the party I stood with supposedly adopted this platform and this is why I agreed to run with them. The platform was very simple.
If a if a debt cannot be paid uh it is either haircut or uh it is uh perpetuated through extending and pretending and since the powers that be the IMF, the European Central Bank, the European Commission, Berlin and so on were only interested in um pretending that we were not bankrupt and the only way you can do that is by kicking the gun down the road by extending and pretending. Uh the proposition I had put to voters was you know if you vote for me and I become finance minister I'm not going to sign sign another you know on the dotted line of any other credit card agreement. So there is going to be a clash.
Um so was that fun? Yes it was fun and at the same time was a complete tragedy because um uh people were actually starving. People on the street were suffering.
uh people in their homes were privatizing their despair. Uh the suicide rate more than doubled and uh we had a genuine humanitarian crisis. So it wasn't a laughing matter.
But was it to some extent spiriting to be able to say to the power to the most powerful finances and institutions of the world, I'm not signing. Yes, it was. It was um very liberating for many people in Greece too because you know the most astonishing thing that people don't realize is that we were a minority government.
Our party got 36% of the vote which was enough with the electoral system that we have to give us um more or less an absolute majority in parliament so that we could form a government. But let's say we had about 40% of the people with us when we were elected. uh that's not nearly half and to clash with the most powerful institutions in the world even 50% plus one is not enough you should have you know 60% of the people with you at least and what was quite remarkable is that during those six months when I was in the ministry we managed to increase the amount of support that we had even though we were clashing uh at the expense of the majority of the Greeks uh with the most powerful institutions We emerged in July that is five and six months after we were elected more or less u to have to score a fantastic 62% support level at the at the referendum that we held on the 5th of July.
We managed to carry the people with us during thick and thin. Tragically, on that very same night of the referendum, my colleague, who was prime minister at the time, surrendered and I resigned. And that's it.
