Tens of thousands of Greeks take to the streets in another day of strikes due to the train accident

Tens of thousands of Greeks came out this Thursday to protest in another day of demonstrations and strikes in the Greek public sector after the train accident on February 28 in the line of the city. railway line that connects the two major cities of the country, Athens and Thessaloniki, killing 57 people, most of them university students.

The Greek government of conservative Kyriakos Mitsotakis —which has to go to the polls this spring— has been put in the eye of the hurricane after the accident, for which many Greeks blame the Greek executive, after years of “negligence and lack of investment in safety road”.

The Mitsotakis government, despite accepting these deficiencies, attributes the accident and the deaths to “human error” by the workers on the railway line during the early morning of the event. To date, four people, charged with negligence and reckless homicide, have been arrested over the incident.

“It was not human error, it was a crime. Our dead are your benefits”, read a banner that criticized the privatizations of the railway sector this Thursday at the demonstration in Syntagma Square, in Athens, before the Greek parliament. The protest ended up being repressed by the Hellenic police with stun grenades and pepper gas.

This Thursday is the It was the second big day of strike in Greece in just one week, and it has meant the total stoppage of all transportation services in the country. During the 24 hours of this Thursday, almost no metro, ferry and passenger plane have operated in the Hellenic country: train services have been stopped since March 1, and they are not expected to reopen until the 22nd of this month, after the Hellenic government has studied all the avenues and confirmed their safety.

Electoral uncertainty

“We will not allow there to be a lack of transparency, that an attempt is to cover up what happened, that those responsible are not punished or that the entire process is delayed so that it < strong>fall into oblivion”, said this Thursday one of the unions that called the strike, GSEE, in a statement published during the day.

Thus, after the accident, the advantage in the pollsThe amount that Mistotakis enjoyed has been reduced by more than half in just a few weeks. While in February, according to an average of polls, the government party, New Democracy, was seven points ahead of the second largest party, Syriza, now it is only < strong>three points of difference. 

The political uncertainty in Greece is total: before the event the Greek executive was going to call the parliamentary elections &mdash ;whose deadline is July of this year— for April 9. Now, however, the date has been left up in the air, and the leaks to the Greek press suggest that Mitsotakis will call the party. The Greeks went to the polls during the month of May. 

However, it is not expected that after these first elections a new government will be able to be formed. that the Hellenic country would be doomed to a second election, this time, in July.