Germans ban Greek minister from talks for calling country ‘fascist’
THE outspoken former Greek finance minister, Yiannis Varoufakis, has claimed he has been banned from visiting Germany and giving political speeches over Zoom amid a crackdown on criticism over Israel.
Mr Varoufakis was due to speak at a pro-palestine congress in Berlin co-organised by the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025, a group of activists campaigning “to democratise Europe”.
Mr Varoufakis, who is the group’s secretary-general, said he was unable to deliver his speech because German police burst into the venue and forced everyone to disband.
Writing in the left wing magazine Jacobin, he said: “Germany’s interior ministry issued a ‘betätigungsverbot’ against me, a ban on any political activity – not just a ban from visiting Germany but also from participation in Zoom events hosted in the country.”
Mr Varoufakis has been a vocal critic of Germany after Angela Merkel’s government took a tough line on Greece during its debt crisis in 2015. Mr Varoufakis, finance minister at the time, said Greece had been given “a choice of being executed or capitulating”.
He has since got involved in various left wing movements including being an advocate for Palestinian rights.
In a video message he said the forced shutdown of the congress involved 1200 police and was tantamount to fascism. It comes amid efforts by “whole of the German political system” to stifle debate around Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and maintain its support of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
“German police proved beyond reasonable doubt by bursting in and interrupting and ending that magnificent congress, that fascism does not need to be in government to be in power.”
Germany has shown strong support for Israel since the war began in Gaza.
The German interior ministry has not publicly commented on Mr Varoufakis’s claims, but if true, legal experts said it would contravene EU law.
Witnesses at the congress were told by the police at a protest against the conference ban that Mr Varoufakis was banned from all political activities alongside two other people on orders of the interior ministry, they told The Telegraph. The ministry did not respond to a request for comment on Saturday.
“It is urgently necessary that [the Mayor of Berlin] Kai Wegner provides a comprehensive legal, not just political, justification for all measures related to the Palestine Congress. At the moment there is the fatal impression that Berlin is placing itself outside of the law” said Ralf Michaels, director of the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law.
Another speaker allegedly banned from the event was the British-palestinian surgeon and rector of the University of Glasgow Ghassan Abu Sittah, who was due to give a speech in person, but was turned away at the German border after hours of questioning.
He is a plastic surgeon who worked with Doctors without Borders at the Al-shifa hospital in the Gaza strip, and was a witness at the International Criminal Court case at the Hague.