MERA25 is the political party born from former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis’s DiEM25 movement. With the slogan ‘Not just another political party’, MERA25 is running for European elections in select EU member states, like Greece, Italy and Germany. Does their slogan really represent their ambitions and campaign? Let’s take a deep dive.
From DiEM25 to political contenders: the journey of MERA25
Founded in 2016, DiEM25 was never meant to transition into a political party. Erik Edman, the political director of the movement, says that the founders had a consensus that in order to make the necessary shift from “the disastrous direction” Europe was headed towards, a broad grassroots activation across the entire continent was required. In Edman’s words, they have repeatedly seen that current political parties weren’t interested in tackling the roots of the European problems. So, they decided to do the “dirty work” themselves and created a political party.
The movement identified a gap in the political landscape: the absence of a political voice that critiques the current state of the European Union while still championing the concept of European unity. DiEM25 seeks to fill this void by providing a critical but supportive stance towards the European project.
‘Not just another political party’ is more than a slogan; it’s a promise that they have made to themselves and their supporters in order to avoid creating more of the same political actors. “What it means to be different for us is not buy into this bipolar dichotomy of being either pro-EU or anti-Europe. Being different also means running and directly connecting with our base, thus never becoming separate from our members,” says Edman.
Anti-establishment running for the establishment
You don’t have to be a radical leftist and supporter of DiEM25/MERA25 to ask yourself: if they hate the EU so much, why are they running to be part of the political establishment it represents?
Well, the party suffers no illusions about whether or not they can achieve the kind of goals they’ve set for themselves politically through European institutions as they are today. They consider that the EU is weaponising the extreme right to scare citizens and maintain the unhealthy institutional status quo. Hence, for MERA25, the European election and the Parliament are a platform from which they can share their ideas and vision.
The vision is radical for many Brusselites – enter the European institutions and, through their engagement with them, showcase their limitations and fight against the “European oligarchy”. Edman says they will engage in the actual political work, but “that isn’t the end goal of our presence in Brussels.” Having a pluralistic political culture and having on the team people of many ideologies and philosophies from green to liberal, MERA25 feels open to work with the left and the Greens, but points out that they are not radical enough and “have contributed to becoming part of the system that they were designed to fight.”
Campaigning against the grain: MERA25’s European elections strategy
Unlike many parties’ lengthy manifestos, MERA25’s European campaign seems simple on paper. It includes three core elements: peace with justice (including moving away from any global military bloc), universal basic income for all Europeans to reunite the continent, as well as a green transition “paid by the people who broke the planet”. National parties may have their own local components added to the main programme, but the party thinks that these three proposals are the most pressing things right now.
While we have more insights into what voters think about ‘taxing the rich’ and the topic of justice and peace are pretty subjective, a 2022 study on universal basic income shows that 55 percent of Germans and 52 percent of Italians support it. Coincidentally, MERA25 is campaigning in both countries.
MERA25’s EP2024 team
MERA25 has already announced its candidates for Germany, Italy and preliminarily for Greece. Berlin team coordinator Karin De Rigo and DiEM25 Organising Director Johannes Fehr are campaigning for Gaza, a green transition paid for by the wealthy, universal living income, and independent Europe.
Greek economist and politician, former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has announced his candidacy, but the confirmation of the Greek list will come only in early April after an internal vote.
Finally, in Italy, four candidates have been announced, none of whom are politicians. Tiare Gatti Mora is a journalist, Elettra Stamboulis is an art curator and high school principal, and Paolo Maria Della Ventura is a European Climate Pact ambassador. In 2024, MERA25 also expanded to Sweden and Cyprus, but no candidates have been announced so far.
Campaigning on Gaza: does it attract or alienate voters?
Besides the core European topics, DiEM25 is one of the loudest pro-Palestinian advocates on the European scale. In fact, if you open their social media accounts and their website, you’ll see dozens of posts and articles on various aspects of the war in Gaza that are very critical of the European support of Israel. However, being an extremely divisive topic for Europeans, one may ask a question if it’s really wise to make it one of the almost foundational aspects of the campaign.
DiEM25’s political director says that their response to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict lies to a huge extent in their intention to maintain humanity and be persistent in their position on human rights. While it’s not the only conflict they have been vocal about, Edman says its horrendous scale shows the actual state of democracy in Europe and the disconnect of governments from the people. To them, it’s much more than a war happening somewhere in the Middle East. It includes symptoms of total dependence of European geopolitics on US foreign interests. “We need to speak about that regardless of the political cost, even if that political cost for us is not getting elected to the European Parliament,” says Edman.
Social media and grassroots: the dual approach of MERA25
MERA25’s key tactics ahead of this election are citizen participation and transnationality. The party doesn’t plan to field professional politicians and aims to empower citizens to run for elections wherever possible, to bridge the divide between the public and their political representatives. Following the transnational nature of the movement, the party also aims to have Europeans campaign for Europeans – Belgians campaigning in Germany, Germans campaigning in Sweden and so on.
The other important component is the use of social media. Both DiEM25 and MERA25 have a significant presence on all social platforms, reaching more than 60,000 people only on the movement’s TikTok page, 78,000 followers on Facebook and 156,000 subscribers on YouTube. The party accounts don’t compete with the movement numbers. Still, the Greek branch of the party has a whooping 16,000 followers on TikTok, and DiEM25’s Head of Communications, Lucas Febraro, around 35,000, which is more than many politicians, national and European parties have. “Just because traditional media has dominated the news scene for the past centuries, we shouldn’t assume that our audience is getting their news from newspapers. It’s our political responsibility to engage young people who demonstrate low participation in European elections,” said Edman.
Social media, however, is not the most fitting medium for two-sided communication with voters. MERA25 is also leveraging its grassroots efforts, volunteers and members, who go out in the streets and other public areas, essentially engaging with people, explaining to them what their main message is for the European elections and asking them whether or not they feel that is something they like to see represented on the ballot paper, without even making them obliged to vote for them. This tactic is something that a lot of traditional parties are slowly drifting away from, confident in and satisfied with the size of their loyal electorate.
Will MERA25’s vision spark a change?
MERA25, which wants to “take it all down and build again”, is not a conventional political party – from how it functions to the policies it proposes. If the European public is as sick of the status quo as the party claims, they should end up in Brussels sooner or later. And in 2019, Yannis Varoufakis was very close to winning that MEP seat. “The one thing you can be sure about with the MERA25 is that we will not go to Brussels and get lost: you will hear from us again, unlike politicians who get sent to Brussels to be silenced and then disappear from there”.
