Running out of oxygen

by | Feb 2, 2025 | Editorial and Analysis

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The fact that the end of February marks two years since the deadly head-on train collision at Tempe, central Greece, would not have been enough for Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis to retract, in a television interview he gave this past week, his initial certainties about the case and confess that “we don’t really know what is true.”

We don’t really know if the freight train was carrying flammable material, we don’t know why the authorities poured gravel and concrete over the crash site, or how we lost crucial video material. It would not have been enough to confess that he was “misled,” as he said, by the information provided to him by the competent services.

The catalyst was civil society and the massive rallies it organized last Sunday (January 26) in Athens, throughout Greece, and in cities abroad. Tens of thousands turned out for the demonstration because they felt “there was no other way.” A diverse crowd, of different ages and backgrounds, families with babies in strollers. They were all there because “they could have been on that train.” The main slogan was “I have no oxygen.” Its realism and symbolism are breathtaking.

The Tempe train disaster is “an open wound, a collective trauma, a collective mourning,” the prime minister said in the same interview – and he’s right. In a recent poll, when asked about the present and future of the country, “anger” is the feeling that most citizens express. Why anger? For the corruption in the country, say 70.7% of respondents. When asked if “the judiciary is doing everything it can to shed light on the Tempe case,” 77.5% say “probably not/definitely not.”

The loss is great and crucial for society. It is a disaster that (as was the deadly blaze in the coastal town of Mati in 2018, with the 104 dead) involves state dysfunctions, which, in part, are due to illegal transactions, to lawlessness that has grown over time, indifference and cynicism. In short: corruption. Where does one begin and where does one end? But that is, also, why governments are elected. They are elected to – at least – start from somewhere, even if they do not have time to finish. Because the much-vaunted “reform of the public sector” is not achieved with half-truths and mean insinuations.

The main lesson from the Tempe tragedy is that the political cost will be paid anyway, whether someone plays the role of the incorruptible (for political gain) or actually proves to be incorruptible. It depends on which side of history one chooses to align oneself with. With the one that “has no oxygen,” or with the one that is doing the depriving.

 

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