Brace yourselves: Former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis is launching his own political movement, DiEM 25
Yanis Varoufakis – Greece's motorbike-riding, leather jacket-wearing, Paris Match-posing former finance minister – is back, with plans launch his own political movement.
German socialist newspaper Neues Deutschland reported today that Varoufakis will launch a "pan-European activist network" known as the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25 to its friends).
The movement is billed as the "third alternative" between renationalisation campaigns and "anti-democratic EU institutions", and is aimed at reforming EU institutions.
According to the website of Berlin theatre Volksbuehne Berlin, the launch will take place there on 9 February.
"If we have learned anything in 2015, [it is] that Europe is in trouble and its fate cannot be left to those [in charge of] institutions that are as undemocratic as they are ineffective," it says.
Varoufakis stepped down from his position as Greek finance minister in July, but not before he had been menaced by a group of masked men and accidentally made an obscene gesture at an entire nation.
In September he hit out at critics, saying European leaders "bullied" Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras into agreeing the final terms of the country's bailout over the summer.
In typical Yanis style, he went full hyperbole: Tsipras was subject to "unbearable bullying, to naked blackmail, to inhuman pressures", he said, while European leaders orchestrated a "dastardly coup".