Yanis Varoufakis Calls on UK to Stay in EU, Reject Cameron's Renegotiation

Both UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s renegotiation of the country’s role in the European Union, and the view that it must leave the bloc, have to be rejected, Greece's former Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis said.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — The UK nationals are set to vote on June 23 in a referendum on the country's EU membership, after Cameron and 27 of his European colleagues secured a deal last week to grant the United Kingdom special status within the bloc.

"We should reject wholeheartedly the fudge that David Cameron came back from Brussels with," Varoufakis told the blog of the European Politics and Policy at the London School of Economics in an interview published Monday.

According to the former minister, Cameron "deformed" Europe in the process of creating his demands.

"Yet at the same time we should also reject the Eurosceptic view that Britain should leave the EU, but stay within the single market… So instead of seeing the referendum as a vote between these two options, and these two options alone, the UK needs a third option: to vote to stay in the European Union so that it can fight tooth and nail against the EU’s anti-democratic institutions," Varoufakis stressed.

Cameron sought to revise the terms of his country's EU membership, focusing on four main issues: shifting power away from EU authorities to the UK national legislature, exempting Britain from the EU "superstate" principle, stripping the euro of the single official EU currency status, and protecting the British economy by keeping eurozone members away from non-eurozone countries’ affairs.