Yanis Varoufakis talks his way out of restaurant confrontation with anarchists
|
Version 0 of 1. Greece’s outspoken finance minister and his wife came under attack by anarchists while dining in a central Athens restaurant. Yanis Varoufakis said the couple were finishing dinner on Tuesday night with a friend in the Exarchia district, a neighbourhood popular with leftists and anarchists, when the group barged into the restaurant. The anarchists, who had their faces covered, demanded the minister leave the area and threw glass objects at the couple, Varoufakis said. Neither of them was hurt. He said that when members of the group moved in a threatening manner against him, his wife, Danae Stratou, embraced him so that the potential attackers could not get at him without hitting her first. “This was not an organised incident,” Varoufakis said in a statement. He said he eventually spoke with the group outside the restaurant and tempers were calmed. Similar attacks against government ministers were frequent in the first years of Greece’s bailout, which began in 2010. Those were believed to have been carried out by leftwing groups, though generally not by anarchists, and sometimes involved attempted physical violence. With his outspoken style and prolific media appearances, Varoufakis became Greece’s best-known minister of the new radical left Syriza party-led coalition government following the 25 January elections. But he has come under criticism from the country’s European creditors, with whom negotiations on unlocking the final €7.2bn instalment of Greece’s bailout have stalled. On Monday, Greece announced a reshuffle of its negotiating team, which was widely seen as a sidelining of Varoufakis. |