A Greek power couple's meteoric ascent stalls
The euro crisis made Yanis Varoufakis and Danae Stratou into celebrities — and targets of violent ridicule.
By Ken Fallin
By Zeke Turner
May 7, 2015	5:30 am
ATHENS — Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis and his wife, the artist Danae Stratou, were having dinner at a restaurant here last week when a band of masked anarchists burst in and hurled glass objects at them. Stratou leapt in front of her husband, using her body to protect him.
"Before I could stop her and before the anarchists reached us, Danae rose and wrapped her arms around me, turning her back to them so that they would have to hit her before they got to me," Varoufakis said in a statement after the incident.
It's not the first time that Stratou has rescued Varoufakis — and likely not the last time that this seemingly mismatched duo, a union between leftist political dogma and one of Greece's old money families, have proved themselves to be one of the continent's more interesting couples.
The pair soared to international prominence in conjunction with the Greek crisis. On the campaign trail and now in government, Varoufakis has become the intellectual force behind the anti-austerity Syriza movement. But the duo's rise has stalled and possibly reversed. Varoufakis's flair complicated his relations with Greece's creditors (he has been sidelined as main negotiator). At home too, his glamorous lifestyle and marriage are objects of scorn in the local press.
His wife faces financial and possibly legal troubles.
The couple met a decade ago after Varoufakis's first wife, Margarite Poulos, took their daughter Xenia and returned to her native Australia, leaving the economics professor "in a state of shock," he wrote on his blog. A few months later, he was saved "from near oblivion" by meeting Stratou, an installation artist, at a private event. They've since described the encounter as love at first sight.
"The moment they met you could see they were going to join up," says George Krimbas, a colleague of Varoufakis from the University of Athens who described himself as "like a father" to the minister.
It was a second marriage for both of them. Stratou's first husband was Giorgos Momferatos, a business consultant, the son of a newspaper publisher murdered by the Marxist N17 terrorist group, and a candidate for the European Parliament from the conservative New Democracy party.
Stratou and Varoufakis share an ideology far from the center-right views of New Democracy. On one of their first trips abroad as a couple, they visited seven troubled places: Kosovo, Belfast, Ethiopia-Eritrea, Palestine-Israel, Cyprus, Kashmir and the US-Mexican border. The result was an art installation project called "CUT-7 dividing lines" for which Varoufakis wrote political-economic texts. "In life and love and work, they're very close," says Krimbas.
Their backgrounds are far apart.
Stratou's grandfather co-founded the textile firm Piraiki-Patraiki, which at one time was the largest employer in Greece after the government. The business went bust but the family wealth remained. The middle of five sisters, Varoufakis's current wife was a favorite of her father Phaedon but ended up in the world of her mother, Eleni Potaga-Stratou, one of Greece's most respected contemporary artists.
He is the private school-educated son of Giorgos Varoufakis, a communist sympathizer imprisoned after Greece's 1945-1949 civil war who later became a steel industry executive. Varoufakis, 54, has written of his formative years: "In truth, Karl Marx was responsible for framing my perspective of the world we live in, from my childhood to this day."
The couple is a Greek example of the champagne left: He gives a Marxist tweak to economic theories; she makes socially minded art. Together, they retreat into elite enclaves like Stratou's house on the island of Aegina, where wealthy families mingle with famous Greek artists. Since World War II, when the Greek intelligentsia mixed with the communist resistance to the German occupation, the country has harbored a double helix of rich conservatives and Marxists — often within the same families.
"She's coming from the highest possible background in Greece. The family Stratou is old money," says Takis Theodoropoulos, a commentator for Kathimerini, a Greek daily. "But Greek society is a very mobile society. You have changes, class upgrades and downgrades in one generation's time."
Through their spokespeople, Varoufakis and Stratou declined requests for an interview.
The ideological difference between the left-wing maverick economics professor and the conservative industrialists of the Stratou family was an obvious potential stumbling block in their romance.
"It's something that we discussed a while back and made a conscious common decision. With Yanis, we are totally in compatibility in our own world, in our common plight that we have chartered over the last decade," Stratou, 50, told Greece's Proto Thema weekly, adding, "I totally agree with his positions and ideology."
In 2010, Varoufakis and Stratou founded a non-profit artists platform called Vital Spaces, which mainly features Stratou's work. As part of the project, she produced a project called "IT'S TIME TO OPEN THE BLACK BOXES!" an installation comprising 100 black boxes constructed from heavy sheets of aluminum, inspired by the recording instruments recovered from airplane crashes. Varoufakis wrote an essay about the installation in which he drew links between the art and the global economic crisis, the product of what he called "super black boxes of social power."
The dynamic in the relationship changed with the Greek economic crisis. "Before the euro crisis erupted in 2009, I was just another economics professor, minding my own little theoretical endeavors, writing obscure papers and esoteric books that only a few hundred nutcases around the world (like myself) would ever read, terribly satisfied in my very own academic cocoon," he wrote on his blog.
Greece's crisis and the international attention it drew turned Varoufakis into a star in Greece.
"I share the view of this European Union as a fundamentally anti-democratic, irrational cartel that has put Europe's peoples on a path to misanthropy, conflict and permanent recession," Varoufakis wrote in a 2013 paper titled, "Confessions of an erratic Marxist in the midst of a repugnant European crisis."
Varoufakis challenged the conventional view that the mess was all Greece's fault and that Athens could be saved with simple belt-tightening instead of a program of economic growth and debt forgiveness. His blog became widely read. He even landed a job as economist-in-residence with Valve, a computer game delivery portal in Bellevue, Washington.
Turning from academia to politics, Varoufakis got more votes than any other candidate in the January general election that swept Syriza into power. He even has groupies.
"He felt like a popstar at the first meetings," said one finance minister who sits in the Eurogroup with Varoufakis and asked to keep his views about a colleague unattributed. At an April meeting in Riga, the Greek was subjected to unprecedented personal criticism by the other ministers who were furious at the lack of progress in Greek bailout talks. His bombastic rhetoric and even his unconventional dress (ties are out, leather jackets and heavy boots are in) isn't going over well in that club.
Back in Athens following the meeting, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras reshuffled his negotiating team, although Varoufakis insists that he's still in the game. "I set the tone," he told Germany's Die Zeit. He may still be finance minister, but talks are now being led by economist and junior foreign minister Euclid Tsakalotos, who appears to be making progress on a deal to save Greece from bankruptcy.
The Varoufakis-Stratou show is becoming a liability for the Greek government and possibly for the couple itself. Opinion polls show growing support among Greeks for a deal and a falling support for the kind of hardline negotiation tactics used by Varoufakis. Although he remains the most popular member of the Syria government — a recent poll says 55 percent of Greeks view him positively — Proto Thema reported that the minister has had a falling out with Tspiras.
The prelude to the pair's current stumbles was a photo spread in the March 15 issue of Paris Match, their apogee in global PR terms. He's shown mixing salad with rippling biceps. He wears a wolf-like grin while hugging his blonde and beautiful wife on their rooftop patio looking onto a spectacular view of the Acropolis.
"In Greece it's very easy to become a star and I think that's what they both exploited," said Theodoropolous. "The problem is that Greece needs some modesty and they are not the best models for modesty."
Varoufakis and his wife are now mocked in local papers. One showed a cartoon of a muscled Varoufakis in black briefs handing off his purple shirt and leather jacket to Tsakalotos.
Proto Thema has reported that Stratou has been renting properties without the required permits or declaring it on her taxes. Varoufakis told the paper that the properties weren't his or fully owned by his wife.
Those kinds of problems won't get Stratou and Varoufakis sympathy in the downtown Exarcheia neighborhood of Athens, long the haunt of leftists and once home to Varoufakis.
As they dined there the other night, a man that Varoufakis described as an "anarchist" yelled at him, according to a recording of the encounter: "It's over. You're a politician. We don't believe you. You will never come to Exarcheia again."
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