ATHENS— Greece’s former Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis has been indicted and will stand trial for allegedly promoting the use of drugs, his left-wing MeRA25 party said in a statement Wednesday.
The former politician, who served in the left-wing Syriza government during the country’s financial crisis in 2015 and remains a darling of the European left, is due to appear in court on Dec. 16. The charges concern comments he made during a podcast, in which he admitted he had tried drugs some 36 years ago at a festival in Australia.
“Determined not to do a Bill Clinton (remember the laughable ‘I didn’t inhale’?), I said I had,” Varoufakis said while acknowledging past use of marijuana and describing a single experience with ecstasy at a festival in Sydney in 1989. The former minister said that while the experience had initially been pleasant, it resulted in a week-long migraine that deterred him from using drugs again.