Greece after the train accident: people's anger is not abating

After a serious train accident in which 57 people died, grief in Greece turned to anger at the government. There were protests this weekend as well, and the government is now, a few weeks before the elections, trying to minimize the damage.

Thessaloniki this weekend: "57 dead" is written in red letters on a sticker that a woman stuck to her sweater. Everyone in Greece's second-largest city knows what it refers to: the death toll from a train accident in Tempi, a village in northern Greece near the town of Larissa. There, on February 28, two trains collided at full speed.

The woman with the sticker is 58 years old and is one of hundreds of thousands of people who took to the streets at noon on March 8 in more than 50 cities in Greece. She says: "This shows that everyone who is in power now, and those who were in power before, do not think about our good, but only about their own profit. This crime says it all."

The protests don't stop. And this Sunday, thousands of citizens gathered in Athens and Thessaloniki demanding the resignation of the government. But the demonstrations are not only directed against the current government, but also against the previous ones. People of different political persuasions and ages protest together and are united in their opinion: the political system as a whole is responsible for the dead in Tempi.

Chronic lack of money and staff

This tragedy seems to have been the last straw. For the government of conservative Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the anger of the citizens, just a few weeks before the parliamentary elections, did not come at the right time. Nothing remains of Mitsotakis' great promises of progress and modernization, with which he won power in the summer of 2019.

These days, the applause of the citizens is not won by politicians, but by trade unionists like Todoris Vardakis. He is in charge of servicing trains in the privatized railway company "Helenik train" and has been warning about problems for years.

Vardakis speaks in front of the protesters about the failures which, according to his assessment, show that for his employer the first priority is not safety, but cost reduction. In an interview with DW, he says that his company is chronically short of money and staff. Everyone knew it, he says, and did nothing.

"It is not enough for the government to react only with the resignation of one minister. On the first day, the prime minister pointed his finger at the head of the railway station and blamed him," Vardakis recalls angrily.

He emphasizes that no ruling party in the last 20 years can be absolved of guilt for the 57 deaths from Tempi. In addition, Vardakis warns that, as far as security is concerned, other types of transport - buses, planes and ships - have been neglected.

"I don't feel safe"

For many people in Greece, this train accident is a symbol of mismanagement and wrong decisions by the political elite, and the country's many daily problems have at best undergone only cosmetic changes. Bad roads, ancient buses, overloaded electricity networks: in Greece, people mostly accept all these shortcomings with anger and without hope that the state will remedy them. But the train disaster from Tempi jolted the country out of its collective lethargy.

"I no longer feel safe in my own country," says 20-year-old student Alexia Atanasiu from Larisa. In a video circulating on social networks, she found words that touched the whole country: "We are all guilty because we always choose the same people who destroy the country. They make me hate my own country."

In an interview for DW, Aleksija asks: "How is it possible that governments have brought this country to this state?" However, she points out that she has not lost faith in democracy.

Influence on parliamentary elections

It is still not known exactly when the elections will be held this year. After April 9 was first mentioned as the date, it is now more likely that it could be May 21 or June 2. In the first public opinion polls after the train accident, Prime Minister Mitsotakis's party lost three percent of the vote and fell below 30 percent. Syriza with Alexis Tsipras at the head did not profit from that loss of the ruling party's votes and remained at 25 percent.

Wolfgang Pisoli, political adviser for risks and crisis management, assesses that Mitsotakis has lost the trust of citizens. "The government initially reacted wrongly to this crisis by citing human error as the cause of the accident." Now, he says, the Prime Minister is trying to save the situation: "He apologized on social media and announced an investigation. However, it will be implemented by a commission formed by the Minister of Transport without consulting the opposition. We have already seen something like that several times, for example with the wiretapping scandal. And that's where the government's crisis management was bad."

Pisoli estimates that the upcoming elections will be a big challenge for Mitsotakis: "He has to calm people's anger, without standing out too much." His room for maneuver is extremely limited."