Yanis Varoufakis: Electorate has rejected ‘dead-end policies’

Ireland has rejected Fine Gael and Labour's "dead-end policies" and Michael Noonan's "cynical" pledge to renegotiate cuts to Ireland's banking debt, former Greek finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis has declared.

Speaking as the Irish General Election 2016 results began to come in, Mr Varoufakis said the inconclusive general election result confirmed a pattern in Europe's periphery, where the "old regime seems to be debased, but there is nothing new to replace it".

Sinn Féin was one alternative and had made gains, he acknowledged: “But they failed to put together an alternative programme that attracts sufficient support from the electorate to make it possible to implement from a position of government.”

Speaking to The Irish Times, he said: "The old regimes of 'Bailoutistan' that were put in place by the troika, or by their acceptance of the troika programmes, have collapsed in every country where we had an election during the last twelve months, beginning with Greece, then Portugal, Spain and now Ireland.

“The old regime is dead but the new regime is refusing, or struggling, to be born and a coherent alternative to this failed sequence of programmes has not emerged,” said Mr Varoufakis, who served for five months as finance minister in the Syriza-led government last year.

In a widely reported intervention in the Irish general election a fortnight ago at a Right2Change meeting in Dublin, Mr Varoufakis urged Irish voters to "send Michael Noonan packing".

“And he has been sent packing in that he’s no longer going to be Ireland’s finance minister,” Mr Varoufakis said.

His singling out of Mr Noonan had not been personal, Mr Varoufakis said. Rather, it was based on what had transpired in the five years since the 2011 election.

“What has been rejected are dead-end policies and the cynicism with which Michael Noonan won the last election on a promise to renegotiate the promissory notes and a serious debt restructuring for Ireland when in reality, in my experience, he never even tried.”

Commenting on the performance of Sinn Féin and the left, Mr Varoufakis said it was clear they needed to do more to convince voters that there is a way out of the crisis.

“They are an alternative, but they failed to put together an alternative programme that attracts sufficient support from the electorate to make it possible to implement from a position of government.”

But he pointed out that the “defeat of our government” last summer, when the Syriza government signed a third bailout memorandum with its lenders, was instrumental in depressing the potential of parties like Sinn Féin.

“The reason why the troika was never interested in discussing Greek recovery and insisted on policies which they knew would return the Greek economy to further depression, was because it was their considered opinion that a defeat of our government and the continuation of the Greek depression would help arrest the growth rate of Podemos and Sinn Féin,” he said.

"It's a very sad day in Europe, when economic depression, which is detrimental to the chances of the EU consolidation process, is being utilised for such petty political purposes," he said.