The far right has been rising for years. The left is looking to fight back.

Varoufakis’s answer is not less power in Brussels, but more. International financial institutions span borders, and so must governments if there is any hope of bending them to the will of voters, he argues. He wants the EU to have far more control over Europe’s economy in exchange for more responsibility to take on bad debts when things go wrong. But he doesn’t want to leave control in the hands of today’s EU leadership, which is mostly unelected. He wants a new elected government in Brussels, transforming the EU into something more like a United States of Europe.

“A united Europe is something we must fight for,” he declared at Oxford.

So why can’t the European left agree? In an interview with BuzzFeed News, Varoufakis put much of the blame on ego and opportunism. That, he said, is why he is trying to build a new party from the ground up to compete in all of the EU.

Existing parties, Varoufakis said, “are far more interested in discussing who goes into bed with whom … and patching up differences on the basis of personality based alliances, not on the basis of a common program.”