A train accident in Greece complicates the re-election of Mitsotakis

“Athens-Thessalonica: one-way map”. Many of 50,000 people who participated in the protests last Wednesday They carried banners in the shape of a train ticket through the streets of the center of the Greek capital, on which the message could be read under the logos of the three parties that have ruled Greece in recent decades: the socialist Pasok, the leftist Syriz and the conservative New Democracy, currently in power.

Apparently distributed by communist militants, the newspaper was the original way of blaming the three main political forces for the Feb. 28 train crash north of the central Greek city of Larissa, the worst in the country’s history, that left 57 dead and dozens injured. Many of the victims were students returning to their places of residence after a few days spent on vacation.

The collision between the freight train and the Intercity, in which there were 350 passengers, is the result of several years of cuts in public services, motivated by the public debt crisis that almost caused the bankruptcy of Greece and its exit from the Eurozone. The station manager, a 59-year-old man with almost no experience and who for 20 minutes on that fateful night was the only person in charge of railway safety in all of Greece, has already been arrested and charged with the accident.

The responsibility, however, goes much further, as recognized by Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis himself. Although he initially spoke of an “unfortunate human error”, he later corrected the mistake and apologized to his compatriots for the “catastrophic state” of the railway infrastructure, whose safety failures have been condemned by trade unions and the EU for years. “If we had a universal remote control system, despite the human error, the tragedy would have been avoided,” admitted the new transport minister, Giorgos Gerapetritis. Greece retains ownership of the state-owned rail network, while the company that operates the trains was sold during a wave of privatization to the Italian consortium FSI for €45 million.

Mitsotakis’s change of heart is explained by fears that popular anger over the train crash will derail his bid to win the next general election. Although not yet officially invited, the possibility of maintenance April 9, a date that was pushed back today because of the recent railroad tragedy. Instead, elections are expected at the end of May, most likely on the 21st, which will give time for nerves to calm down. “Mitsotakis hopes to get time to implement some of the promised measures for the re-establishment of railway traffic under safe conditions and that the investigation into the accident is progressing,” explains the local newspaper Macropolis. The left is closing the gap. For the ruler of the New Democracy, the railway tragedy is already beginning to be felt in the polls: voter intention has fallen by around 3%, according to the latest poll by the Ant-1 television channel , which reduced the margin compared to Syriza to less than five points.If these expectations are confirmed at the polls, it would complicate the conservatives’ intention to repeat the absolute majority achieved in the previous elections held in 2019.

more scandals

Furthermore, the train accident is not the only recent scandal of the Mitsotakis government, which at the end of January passed a vote of no confidence in the parliament motivated by a plan to secretly wiretapping thirty politicians, soldiers and journalists. In order to determine Greece’s immediate political future, the next few weeks will be “crucial”, according to what Agi Nikos Maratzidis, professor of political science at the University of Macedonia in Thessaloniki, told the agency. «Currently, many people do not think politically. But as the days pass, there will be a discussion about those responsible for the incident,” he said.

Maratzidis warned that the recent demonstrations are the best evidence that public opinion has not accepted the original explanation that the train tragedy was caused by human error. This is clearly shown by the banners that the protesters carried last Wednesday, which read: “It wasn’t an accident, it was state murder”.