Last February, we had the opportunity to exchange with Costas Lapavitasas in an event where Marta Prat, Laia Altarriba and Joao França exchanged with this economist from SOAS University of London.
Lapavitsas was elected member of the Hellenic Parliament with Syriza in the general elections of January of 2015 and later he joined Popular Unity in August of 2015.
He is known for his criticism of the modern Western financial system, in particular the debt crisis of the Greek government, the European debt crisis and the European Union. He is also a columnist for the British newspaper The Guardian. In 2007 he founded Research on Money and Finance (RMF), an international network of political economists focused on the money, finance and the evolution of contemporary capitalism.
Lapavitsas, like other Greek economists, was already a Eurosceptic in 2011. He pleaded for Greece to abandon the euro and return to the drachma in response to the crisis of the Greek government. On March 2nd 2015, Lapavitsas wrote in The Guardian that the liberation of the Greek people from austerity and, simultaneously, avoiding a major break with the eurozone, is an impossible task for the new government of Greece.
Now he has founded EReNSEP, the European think tank that presents analisis and proposals of academic and political nature to build development projects in Europe in favor of the popular classes, more affected by the crisis.