Yanis Varoufakis, Greek finance minister

Earnest, energetic and wearing an electric blue, open-necked shirt that hung loosely under his long leather jacket, Yanis Varoufakis toured Europe's capitals this week in search of debt relief and a new deal for the Greek economy. By Friday, it appeared that Greece's finance minister had made minimal progress on the political front. Indisputably, however, he had turned upside down conventional notions of modern finance ministers as dull, sober-suited number crunchers.

Some fashion commentators said unkindly that he looked like a nightclub bouncer, which would presumably make Alexis Tsipras, the prime minister, the joint's owner. Actually, both men have the handsome features of film stars, Mr Tsipras looking like Sean Connery in Dr No and Mr Varoufakis like the ageing, shaven-headed boxer in Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino's 1994 movie. Like that Bruce Willis character, Mr Varoufakis even arrived at his first cabinet meeting on a 1300cc Yamaha and is not short of female admirers. "Damn, the Greek finance minister is sexy," Isabel Moreira, a Portuguese socialist member of parliament, wrote on her Facebook page.

The casual dress favoured by Mr Varoufakis, and other Greek ministers, is more than a style choice. It is a statement that Syriza, the radical leftist party that dominates the ruling coalition in Athens, is an anti-establishment movement intent on challenging German-led economic orthodoxy.

No incident in Mr Varoufakis's eventful week better demonstrated this than a news conference he held in Berlin on Thursday with Wolfgang Schauble. After Germany's finance minister observed tactfully that the two men had agreed to disagree about how to tackle Greece's economic woes, Mr Varoufakis retorted: "We didn't even agree to disagree, from where I'm standing."

Mr Varoufakis, who was born in Athens in 1961 to a middle-class family and went to an exclusive private school, is an economist whose enthusiasms extend from Thai food to English literature. After Syriza's election victory he borrowed from the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas for his blog: "Greek democracy today chose to stop going gently into the night. Greek democracy resolved to rage against the dying of the light."

The minister's father served time on Makronisos, an island used as a government-run prison camp for the political re-education of Greeks who had fought on the communist side in the 1946-49 civil war. Despite his radical past, the father became head of Greece's biggest steel producer. Mr Varoufakis's mother was an ardent feminist active in the Women's Union of Greece, founded by members of Pasok, the socialist party, to promote gender equality.

The young Mr Varoufakis was inspired to study economics after he met Andreas Papandreou, an economist who founded Pasok and became Greece's first socialist prime minister. Mr Varoufakis studied in the UK at Essex university, a hotbed of radical thought in the 1980s. He lectured at Essex and Cambridge before emigrating to Australia in 1988.

A popular lecturer at Sydney university, he had his own slot on a local television show serving the Greek diaspora, on which he promoted his critical opinions on how the conservative government of John Howard, the then prime minister, was running the economy. He also acquired Australian citizenship.

Mr Varoufakis was invited back to Greece in 2000 to teach economic theory at Athens university by Yannis Stournaras, a professor who is now the country's central bank governor. "Yanis was an exciting new addition . . . He made an important contribution, among other things, to our expertise on game theory," says Mr Stournaras.

This expertise came in useful in the US, where in 2012 Mr Varoufakis was appointed economist-in-residence at Valve, an online gaming company. He emerged as a leading commentator on Greece's financial crisis after he launched a blog, "Thoughts for the post-2008 world". He rarely pulls his punches. After one post-election television interview, he wrote: "As a fan of the BBC, I must say I was appalled by the depths of inaccuracy in the reporting underpinning this interview (not to mention the presenter's considerable rudeness). Still . . . it was fun!"

He is married to Danae Stratou, an installation artist and his second wife, with whom he is often seen at fashion-able bars in the upmarket Kolonaki district of Athens.

Mr Varoufakis has variously described himself as a "decent second-rate economist" and a "libertarian Marxist". He sits with Syriza legislators in parliament but is not a party member. As long as he enjoys Mr Tsipras's confidence this may not matter much but, if ever he angers Syriza's ultra-leftist faction, his lack of party membership might turn into a weakness and see him ejected from the government.

For the moment, however, Mr Varoufakis is, as he puts it, "fighting the good fight" - trying to persuade the finance ministers who wear ties that it is in their interest to ease Greece's debt burden, if necessary by "smart debt engineering" rather than an outright cancellation of some of its €315bn foreign debt.

History, he believes, is on his side. Speaking to the Financial Times in London, he put on his most charming smile and cited a lesson from Ancient Greece: "Sometimes the larger, powerful democracies undermined themselves by crushing the smaller ones."

The writers are respectively the FT's Europe editor and Athens correspondent

© The Financial Times Limited 2015. All rights reserved.
FT and Financial Times are trademarks of the Financial Times Ltd.
Not to be redistributed, copied or modified in any way.
Euro2day.gr is solely responsible for providing this translation and the Financial Times Limited does not accept any liability for the accuracy or quality of the translation