ÉLOGE DE FRANCESCA ALBANESE PAR YANIS VAROUFAKIS 03 MAY 2026

By Yanis Varoufakis - Francesca Albanese - Human Synthesis-13 May 2026

There's a question that haunts me in the morning, when sleep is delayed and the mind stirs the past. The question is: "What would I have done in the 1930s, the day after Crystal Night?" »Not what I say I'd do. Not what I hope I'd do. But what would I really have done — when the trains started rolling, when the neighbours shut up, when the price of decency became the loss of everything?

Most of us wouldn't have done much I think. No by malice. Out of fear. With this soft and insidious conviction that someone else will speak, that the situation is complex, that we must be "reasonable." Let us not forget that ordinary is the alibi of extraordinary. And how we've clung to this alibi! As we are still hanging on to it!And then every once in a while, at the most terrible moments, someone comes along who doesn’t hold on. Someone who steps forward when others step back. Someone naming things by their name when everyone else is busy naming something else.

Francesca Albanese is that person. She stands before the world — alone, unarmed, armed only with law, language and a rare courage — and she says what centrists won’t say, what Foreign Affairs departments won’t, what editorial committees won’t say. She says, "This is genocide." And we are watching it happen. »Don't tell me it's hyperbole. Don't tell me the term is disputed.

She didn’t use it lightly. She used it as a doctor scientifically achieves a diagnosis — not to hurt, but to warn. Not to exaggerate, but to name. And for that they picked her up. Oh how they got her. Slander. Investigations. Viral editorials. Bank accounts are frozen. Expropriation of the only apartment she has ever owned. The machine of respectable people started crushing it.

Because "good people" can't stand what it represents: a mirror stretched in front of their complicity. Let's go back once again to the 1930s. Let's go back to the few that stood up when the trains started rolling, loaded with Jews. There was Aristides de Sousa Mendes, Portuguese consul in Bordeaux. He has challenged his own government. He signed thousands of visas, by hand, for hours, until his fingers bleed.

He saved more lives than Schindler did. And he died without a penny, dishonored, erased. There was a German officer in Warsaw named Wilm Hosenfeld. He hid a Jewish pianist in the rubble. He didn't save thousands. He saved only one. But this unique man — Władysław Szpilman — carried the souvenir. And the memory is "the only refuge from which one cannot be expelled." There was Raoul Wallenberg. There were villagers of Chambon. There were those anonymous few, those discreet few, those angry few who said, "Not on my watch."

»Francesca Albanese is their heir. No not because she's carrying a gun. Nope not because she has refugees in her basement. But because she does something so dangerous in a world that has perfected the art of not seeing. She sees. And she talks. She does not speak out as a diplomat. Thank god she doesn't! Diplomats gave us the language of “arguments from both sides”, “restraint” and “proportionality”. Diplomatic language is the tombstone of moral clarity. No, she is speaking out as a lawyer. As a human being. As a woman who looked into the abyss and refused to call it a "complex geopolitical landscape".

Edna O’Brien once described a character who “had the carelessness of those who have already lost everything there is to lose.” Francesca Albanese has not lost everything. She has her dignity, her position, her voice, her family. But she calculated the price to speak truth to power. And she decided that the price is infinitely lower than that of silence. What is this price? Name it. She has been called anti-Semite — she stands on the ground of international law forged in the ashes of Auschwitz and the fires of Nuremberg. She’s been called a conspirator — she cites every source, every footnote, every UN resolution. We called her naive — she who understands the wheels of realpolitik better than anyone.

These accusations are not arguments. These are the spits of those who feel threatened. Because Francesca Albanese threatens something very precious to the powerful: the right to commit atrocities without being reported. My friends, the 1930s didn't come with military boots and pogroms from day one. They came in baby steps. With "reasonable" restrictions. With "proportionate" measures. With the silence of respectable people. We tell ourselves that we would have acted differently. That we would have been Sousa Mendes. That we would have been Wallenberg. But most of us, I'm afraid, would have been those neighbors who later said, "I didn't know." »

Francesca Albanese knows. And she refuses to claim otherwise. So let's give her tribute. Not with statues or trophies she's not after. But with something stronger: with our own refusal to look away. With our own voices, raised in places that are safe for us but dangerous for her. With our own bodies, if necessary. A brave woman injured during a demonstration outside a US nuclear military base in 1982, the infamous Greenham Common, told me "the heart is a hunter for what it can't have." But I say that the heart is a hunter for what it will not lose. And what we will not lose is the memory of those who rose when standing cost them everything.

Francesca Albanese is getting up today. In our time. In our name. Under our indifferent sky.Let's get up with her.Not tomorrow. Not when it's safe. Now.