Varoufakis launches new political party

Yanis Varoufakis, Greece's former finance minister who transfixed Europe with his unconventional style at the climax of the debt crisis, launched a new party on Monday promising to free his country from debt bondage.

The academic economist - who once described the austerity imposed by Greece's creditors as "fiscal waterboarding" - said his new MeRA25 party would revive the economy through debt restructuring and other measures.

Varoufakis's regular criticism of eurozone policy and his anti-austerity stance angered Greece's creditors and brought the country to the brink of a euro exit in 2015 before he resigned.

He won a measure of celebrity through his combative stance, though there have been no recent polls to test whether that will be enough to take his party past the 3-percent threshold to enter parliament.

Greece was living as a "debtors'...