Greece’s finance minister calls it quits, denouncing the debt

The ‘no’ vote in the July 5 referendum in Greece on the country’s national debt has produced its first casualty, and it's a surprising one: Flamboyant Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis reisgned Monday morning after Sunday's vote.

The 54-year old economist had been one of the leading "no" campaigners, so at first glance his departure makes no sense.

“There’s lots of speculation,” says The World’s Clark Boyd, who interviewed Varoufakis a number of times while working as The World’s Europe correspondent. “Of course, he was the guy who was at the center of those negotiations between Greece and its Eurozone partners. And I think that there was this sense that those Eurozone partners had kind of tired of him. That might be putting it a little diplomatically.”

German politician Michael Fuchs, recently put it much more bluntly. “Yanis Varoufakis,” says Fuchs, “insulted the whole of Europe last weekend, telling us we are terrorists. I mean, we spent more than 300 billion euros ($330 billion) for Greece, and then telling us we’re terrorists? I’m sorry, this is not the way to talk to each other.”

The bottom-line is that Greece remains broke, despite the vote, and can’t negotiate with its European creditors while Varoufakis remains in the chair.

But that same feisty rhetoric made Varoufakis enormously popular with many Greek citizens.

“Ordinary Greeks,” says Boyd, “said that this is the one guy who’s standing up for us. He’s going before these European politicians and telling it like it is. We can’t take any more austerity. We can’t tighten our belts any more.”

Varoufakis is a colourful figure, known for his leather jackets and riding his big black motorbike.

“He always had a flair for the dramatic,” says Boyd. “He had amazing turns of phrase, that managed to go high-brow and low-brow at the same time. He said that being in the European Union was like being in Hotel California: ‘You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.’”

It’s not clear now what Varoufakis will do now. In a blog post he said the referendum would go down in history as the day when Aa small European nation rose up against debt-bondage."

He added that he would wear "the creditors" loathing with pride.