Strikes and demonstrations are due to take place across Greece on Friday.
Public and private-sector trade unions have called a 24-hour general strike, which means that ships will not sail, planes will not fly and trains will stay in their depots.
Shops and businesses across the country will also remain closed for several hours. Night clubs will not open their doors, and even Anna Vissi, one of the country’s biggest music stars, will not sing on Friday evening.
Demonstrations are planned in almost every city, town and village nationwide. People are using social media to call on their fellow citizens to join the protests.
Even expats are joining in, with memorial demonstrations planned in cities across Europe and America and as far afield as Sydney, Zanzibar, Buenos Aires and even the town of Akureyri in northern Iceland.
The people involved are all calling for the same thing: justice for the victims of the worst railway disaster in the history of Greece.
‘It could have been your own children’
Friday marks the second anniversary of the Tempi railway disaster. Just before midnight on February 28, 2023, InterCity 62 from Athens to Thessaloniki collided head on with a freight train.
The accident happened near the Greek village of Tempi, which is close to the city of Larissa in central Greece.
Fifty-seven people died in the crash, including many students who often traveled this route. Many more were injured.
The tragedy sent shockwaves through Greek society. Many realized that it could so easily have been their own children, their own grandchildren, their own friends sitting on that train.
There was a massive outpouring of grief and an agonizing need for answers: How could this have happened? And could something like this happen again?
Greek public demands answers
Two years later, the families of the victims and the Greek public are still waiting for answers.
This time, their questions are more specific: How could the collision have happened? What caused the massive explosion? Was the freight train carrying illegal, hazardous cargo? And who is to blame for the accident?
They are also calling for justice. Polls indicate that 70% to 80% of Greeks believe that the government is involved in a cover-up: The defective signal from 2019 that was not repaired, delays in investing in safety technology that was funded by EU money, the hiring of an unqualified 60-year-old supporter of the ruling party as station master in Larissa.
Allegations of a cover-up
The government has categorically rejected all allegations of a cover-up. But the public is not buying the government stance because it looks highly likely that the disaster will never be fully cleared up: Straight after the accident, the responsible authorities did not take the necessary steps to secure security camera footage or carry out the necessary autopsies.
In addition, about 300 cubic meters of earth were removed immediately after the collision and the area filled in with gravel. This means that it is no longer possible to establish whether the freight train involved was carrying illegal, flammable material that caused the explosion.
One of the responsible politicians at the time, Transport Minister Kostas Achilleos Karamanlis of the Karamanlis Greek conservative political dynasty, resigned the day after the accident.
Two months later, however, he was allowed to stand in the parliamentary election. The conservative ruling New Democracy party of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis won the parliamentary election convincingly in June 2023, and Karamanlis was welcomed back to parliament by fellow party members with a standing ovation.
For the government, it seemed, Tempi was a thing of the past.
‘We won’t forget, we won’t forgive’
But on January 26 last, almost two years to the day since the accident, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of Athens, Thessaloniki and a hundred other cities and towns nationwide to call for justice for the victims of the accident.
The motivation for this new round of protests was the release of recordings that proved that about 30 of the 57 victims were still alive for some time after the collision and could possibly have been saved.
The families of the victims called for the protests on social media. The spontaneous response was overwhelming: The resulting demonstrations were the largest seen in Greece in over a decade.
Protesters chanted “We won’t forget, we won’t forgive” and “Justice! ‘No’ to a cover-up.”
‘A collective trauma’
Indeed, the demonstrations were so huge that Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis gave an interview on January 30 in which he revised his earlier statement that the cause of the accident had been human error.
Looking unusually humble, Mitsotakis admitted that the search for truth and justice was progressing “slowly” and pledged improvement.
He described the Tempi train crash as an “open wound, a collective trauma and a collective grief” and added that as both a father and prime minister, he bowed his head to Maria Karistianou, president of the Association of Relatives of Tempi Victims, whose daughter Marti was killed in the accident.
For almost two years, Karistianou has been tirelessly fighting both in Greece and abroad for clarity on the accident and has faced attacks from pro-government journalists, Internet trolls and a number of ministers as a result.
PM accuses opposition of ‘politicizing’ the tragedy
But faced with his party’s poor ratings in the opinion polls (according to Metron Analysis, support for New Democracy stands at 22%), Mitsotakis has since adopted a more strident tone.
In an interview with the newspaper Kathimerini, he railed against those who have no faith in the judiciary and expressed his support for the country’s legal system. “Some would like to lead us into a jungle,” he said and accused the opposition parties of “politicizing” the tragedy.
But it wasn’t the opposition parties that called for protests on Friday. People are following the call of the families of the victims and are demonstrating for justice and against the government’s handling of the tragedy, which they consider unacceptable.
For its part, the government rejects the allegations being leveled at it and has advised people not to take part in the demonstrations. In line with this attitude, a poster has been doing the rounds on social media proclaiming “I’m not going to the demonstration. I trust the judiciary.”
This article was originally published in German.
