Sweden on the Mediterranean

What is so irritating about Varoufakis is not his radicality but his rational pragmatic modesty — if one looks closely at the proposals offered by Varoufakis, one cannot help noticing that they consist of measures which, forty years ago, were part of the standard moderate social-democratic agenda (in Sweden in the 1960s, the programme of the government was much more radical). It is a sad sign of our times that today you have to belong to a radical Left to advocate these same measures — a sign of dark times but also a chance for the Left to occupy the space that, decades ago, was that of the moderate Left centre.

—Slavoj Žižek, The Courage of Hopelessness, (London: Penguin, 2018), 51-52.