Ioannis Georgiou "Yanis" Varoufakis (/ˈjænɪs væruːˈfækɪs/; born 24 March 1961) is a Greek economist and politician. Since 2018, he has been Secretary-General of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25), a left-wing pan-European political party he co-founded in 2016. Previously, he was a member of Syriza and was Greece's Minister of Finance between January and July 2015, negotiating on behalf of the Greek government during the 2009–2018 Greek government-debt crisis.

Varoufakis was first elected as a Member of the Hellenic Parliament with Syriza, representing the Athens B constituency from January to September 2015. He was appointed Minister of Finance by Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras two days after the election, serving in this role between January and July 2015. Varoufakis then represented Thessaloniki A from July 2019 to May 2023 as a MeRA25 Member of Parliament.

Varoufakis was born in Palaio Faliro, Athens, on 24 March 1961, to Georgios and Eleni Varoufakis (née Tsaggaraki).

Varoufakis's father, Georgios Varoufakis, was an Egyptiote Greek who emigrated from Cairo to Greece in 1946 in order to study chemistry at the University of Athens. In the midst of the second Greek Civil War, he was physically harassed by the police and asked to sign a denunciation of communism. In response, he said: "Look, I am not a Buddhist, but I would never sign a denunciation of Buddhism". Due to his refusal to denounce communism, he was imprisoned for four years on the island of Makronisos, which was used as a political re-education camp. After being released in 1950, Georgios Varoufakis completed his university studies in metallurgy and chemical engineering and found employment as the personal assistant to the director of Halyvourgiki; Greece's biggest steel producer. In 2003, he was appointed chairman of the board of directors of Halyvourgiki; he held the position until the company's closure in January 2020. He died in September 2021.

Varoufakis's mother Eleni was studying chemistry at the University of Athens in the late 1940s. She shifted away from her conservative background in 1950, after meeting fellow chemistry student Georgios Varoufakis, who was, at the time, allied to United Democratic Left (EDA). Georgios and Eleni had two children, Yanis and Trisevgeni. In the mid-1970s, Eleni Varoufaki was an activist for the Women's Union of Greece, which promoted women's equality and was initiated by members of PASOK. By the early-1980s, the couple had converged politically to centre-left views and the socialist PASOK. Eleni served as a municipal councillor of Palaio Faliro for several years prior to her death in 2008.

Varoufakis was six years old when the military coup d'état of April 1967 took place. Varoufakis later said that the military junta showed him a "sense of what it means to be both unfree and, at once, convinced that the possibilities for progress and improvement are endless". The junta collapsed when Varoufakis was in junior high school. While attending the private Moraitis School, Varoufakis decided to spell his first name with one nu, rather than the standard two, for "aesthetic" reasons. When his teacher gave him a low mark for that, he became angry and has continued spelling his first name with one nu ever since.

Varoufakis completed his secondary education during 1976, when his parents deemed it too dangerous for him to continue his education in Greece. Therefore, he moved to the United Kingdom in 1978 where he entered the University of Essex. His "initial urge was to study physics" but he decided that "the lingua franca of political discourse was economics". He enrolled in the economics course at Essex, but it has also been suggested that he decided to enroll in economics after meeting Andreas Papandreou. After only a few weeks of lectures, Varoufakis switched his major field of study to mathematics.

While at the University of Essex, he joined various political organisations including ComSoc (the University Communist Society) and the Troops Out Movement, which campaigned for a British withdrawal from Northern Ireland. Varoufakis was elected secretary of the Black Students Alliance, a choice that caused some controversy, given that he is not black, to which he responded "that black was a political term and, as a Greek, on the grounds of ethnicity he had as much reason to be there as anyone else." Varoufakis also took part in student debates, where one of his rivals was John Bercow, who later became the UK Speaker of the House of Commons.