- Title: Years of disasters, scandals, failures fuel Greece's rail crash protests
- Date: 20th March 2025
- Summary: ATHENS, GREECE (MARCH 14, 2025) (REUTERS) POLITICAL ANALYST MARIA KARAKLIOUMI (SOUNDBITE) (Greek) POLITICAL ANALYST, MARIA KARAKLIOUMI, SAYING: “For the first time they were not out on the streets to demand better wages and pensions or personal privileges. They came out to demand a country that is functional, a social request that says, ‘we want Greece to function as a mod
- Embargoed:
- Keywords: GOVERNMENT GREECE POLITICS PROTEST TRAIN CRASH
- Location: ATHENS, LARISSA, AND THESSALONIKI, GREECE
- City: ATHENS, LARISSA, AND THESSALONIKI, GREECE
- Country: Greece
- Topics: Ground Accidents/Collisions,Disaster/Accidents,Europe
- Reuters ID: LVA00B844713032025RP1
- Aspect Ratio: 16:9
- Story Text: Two years after a deadly train crash, 30 year-old survivor Evi Tsapari trembles when she visits the train station. When the train tumbled off the tracks that night in 2023 the windows smashed and the lights went out. To escape, Tsapari jumped out of the window. She stayed in hospital for three days to treat wounds and smoke inhalation.
She is slowly healing but still waiting for justice.
Despite investigators blaming safety failures and decades of neglect of Greece's railways, no top politician has faced investigation over the worst crash in the country's history - in part, critics say, because of laws that protect them from prosecution.
Tsapari is among 1.4 million people who have signed a petition to overturn that law. But its progress is stalled by legal debate.
Hundreds of thousands took to the streets on the second anniversary of the train crash last month, fuelled by anger at the lack of safety reforms, but also by a long-standing mistrust of government and politicians after a string of disasters and scandals in recent years.
That anger looks set to weaken Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, whose popularity has waned in the polls since he won re-election in 2023. He replaced the transport minister in a cabinet reshuffle last week.
Mitsotakis and his government, which came to power in 2019, deny wrongdoing in the train crash. He says institutions remain strong under his watch.
Two years after the train crash, safety gaps remain, said Greece's Air and Rail Accident Investigation Authority. A judicial inquiry is unfinished.
Mitsotakis reiterated a pledge to modernise the railway network, this time by 2027, and hire a foreign company to take over its maintenance.
But relatives have accused the government of a cover-up, which it denies.
One former minister has asked parliament to charge him with breach of duty to clear his name before a judicial panel. Parliament only has until October to probe other ministers before a statute of limitations comes into effect, said former deputy prime minister and law professor Evangelos Venizelos.
Critics say trust in politicians was broken long before the 2023 rail disaster.
Among other recent disasters, in 2018 a wildfire trapped residents in the seaside town of Mati, killing 104 people who were waiting for evacuation. Survivors accused authorities of failing to coordinate rescue operations and responding too slowly. The government and local authorities rejected that, blaming arsonists and high winds that fanned the flames.
In 2017, 25 people died in flash floods in the town of Mandra, that residents largely blamed on authorities' failure to act on prior safety warnings and poor infrastructure.
These came at the end of a decade-long debt crisis during which governments repeatedly slashed wages and pensions.
This month, victims and relatives of the disasters attended an appeals trial over the initial verdict of the Mati fire.
Kalli Anagnostou, 43, suffered fourth and fifth degree burns across her body in the fire. She was on vacation in Mati with her five year-old son, who was in a trauma unit for 35 days afterwards. Anastasio Beretas, 33, lost his father in the raging floods in Mandra. Neither feel they will see any political figures face any punishment.
Since the 1990s, Greece has also been rocked by a string of political scandals, including embezzlement at a bank, money laundering, and the sale of overpriced bonds to pension funds.
In 2022, a wiretapping scandal prompted the resignation of Mitsotakis' closest aide. The Supreme Court prosecutor later dropped the case.
For all the scandals, only a few ministers have been held accountable. Parliamentary committees set up to investigate ministers, upon approval by a majority of lawmakers, rarely push the case forward, said analysts.
In 2023 elections, Kostas Karamanlis, who was transport minister during the train crash and resigned immediately after, was re-elected in a region which is a governing party stronghold.
Only a third of Greeks believe that democracy and the rule of law are well protected in Greece, an October EU survey showed, the lowest score in the bloc.
Greece scored second worst in the eurozone in Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index in 2024, though its ranking had slowly improved over the previous decade.
After surviving a confidence vote in parliament this month Mitsotakis said that ahead of a constitutional amendment, he would propose an edit of the article that protects politicians from prosecution.
He told his ministers in a meeting after the cabinet reshuffle their motto would be “faster and bolder”, vowing 'big changes and big incisions' to make citizens’ lives better.
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