On the 28 February, Greece experienced its biggest day of mass protest in many years. During a general strike with mass participation, large gatherings where organised in every city and town in Greece, along with protests in almost every city abroad with a Greek community. In Athens alone, it was a giant demonstration, with the estimates ranging from 400,000 to 800,000 persons attending, and everyone agreeing this was perhaps the biggest demonstration ever organised. This followed, another day of protest, on the Sunday 26 January, when the demonstrations organised all over Greece were the biggest since the 2010s.
To understand this wave of protests we need to go back two years. On the 28 February 2023, a passenger train, headed for Thessaloniki, and a freight train, headed for Athens, collided head-on in the broader area of the Tempi valley, the passenger train running at 150 km/h and the freight train at almost 90 km/h. The result was 57 dead and many injured, many of them students returning to Thessaloniki, in the worst train tragedy in Greece in many years. Most of the persons were killed due to the collision, but some survived the collision but were killed by a subsequent fire, caused by still to be determined inflammable hydrocarbons probably carried (but not listed) by the freight train.
The immediate cause of the tragedy was that the two trains were running on the same line, because the Larissa Train Station Master failed to properly set a switch. The real cause had to do with many years of neglecting the railway network and infrastructure, cutting budgets, drastically reducing maintenance personnel, and privatising the passenger and freight transport services. Currently, Greece has the smaller number of maintenance and infrastructure employees per kilometre of rail and the lowest spending per kilometre of rail in the European Union. The part of the line where the accident took place, was a “blind part”, meaning that there was no remote system of real time information about the positioning of the trains and the ECTS that could have prevented the accident was not operational because it had been under construction for many years. The Station Master at that shift, who made the tragic error of not returning a line switch to its normal configuration was working alone at his post and under pressure, had to deal with multiple communications and had been recently appointed to this post. To make matters worse, because of frequent problems with the line, train drivers were used to being sent to the opposite line, which can explain why the driver of the passenger train most probably thought that it was not a problem that he was going upwards on the downward line.
The immediate reaction of the New Democracy government was to attempt to control the narrative and suggest that the tragedy should be attributed to “human error” only, primarily the Station Master’s, and refused to take responsibility for the delays in the works that had to with remote monitoring and emergency safety systems. Even worse, they leaked to the press tape recordings of the Station Master’s communications that later were proved to have been tampered with in order to stress even more the “human error” angle. The minister of transport, Kostas Karamanlis (from one of Greece’s biggest political dynasties), only a few days prior to the train wreck, had called it an insult to raise issues of railway safety, despite the railway trade unions having repeatedly raised the dangers associated with the way the railways were operating. He resigned as minister, but was he was included in the New Democracy lists for the following elections and was duly re-elected.
Despite the important wave of mass protest at the time, led by university students, New Democracy managed to win the elections of 2023. It got 40.56% and a comfortable parliamentary majority with SYRIZA getting only 17.83%. Alexis Tsipras resigned, and SYRIZA entered a deep crisis, with the Kasselakis debacle[1] and the subsequent split.
At the same time, the judicial investigation of the train wreck was a travesty of justice. The site of the accident was flattened a few days after, supposedly to make the ground more stable for the cranes, with evidence being destroyed. The autopsies were summary, no extensive research was done on the exact causes of death and biomaterial gathered was soon destroyed.
Above all, the initial investigation was based on the groundless theory that the huge fireball that is clearly visible in security cameras’ footage of the accident immediately after the crash was from the silicon oils contained in the electric locomotives’ transformers. To make matters worse, the National Aviation Investigation and Railways Accidents and Transportation Safety (HARSIA) existed only in paper and started working only after months, without being in a position to examine the accident site in its original form.
However, at the same time, the association of the relatives of the victims started a huge struggle to bring to light the actual causes of the accident, demanding truth and justice. The Mitsotakis’s government, feeling that it was under no real threat, opted to cynically refuse any real political responsibility and also any criminal responsibility for the ministers and government officials involved. At the same time, more and more questions started surfacing. There was evidence that of hydrocarbons in soil samples collected, in particular xylene, raising the question of whether the freight train was carrying also unknown and undocumented quantities of inflammable substances, most probably paint thinners that are often used mixed with petrol to make an illicit extra profit since they are not subject to fuel tax. The fact that no footage of the loading of the freight train could be found only further fuelled suspicion. As judicial inquiry and formal indictments about levelling of the accident site and the subsequent destruction of evidence came with a significant delay. The Investigative Committee of the Greek Parliament was a parody, with the New Democracy majority refusing the testimony of crucial witness and passing a resolution that basically exonerated the government. Even the European Public Prosecutor’s office, who brought charges against 23 suspects, including 18 public officials – for crime relating to the execution of the infamous ‘Contract 717’ for restoring remote traffic control and signalling systems on the Greek rail network, co-funded by the EU, complained about lack of cooperation from the part of Greek authorities.
In a certain way, the Greek government was using the same playbook used with the eavesdropping scandal. In 2022 there had been a series of revelations that the leader of PASOK Nikos Androulakis, journalists, ministers of the New Democracy government, businesspersons, high ranking judges and high-ranking army officers had been targeted by Israeli-made illegal spyware – in some instances after being also the targets of National Intelligence agency ‘legal’ eavesdropping. There has been plenty of evidence that this was coordinated by the Prime Minister’s office, but not only the government refused any responsibility but also the investigation by the office of the Prosecutor of the Supreme Penal Court, basically declared that there was no government wrongdoing.
During all this period, the Tempi tragedy remained something that mobilised society. On the 11 October 2024, a huge concert was organised in Athens with 50,000 attending and hundreds of thousands watching it online, with the government still refusing to admit real responsibility.
The turning point was in January 2025. As part of the investigation reports by experts hired by the families of the victims, a video was made public which combined a frame-by-frame analysis of the fireball and the progression of the fire with the sound recordings made when iPhone automatically connected to the emergency 112 line. These recordings made it evident that there were survivors of the collision that died due to the subsequent fire that swallowed up the oxygen. “I have no oxygen” one of the victims is heard saying. ‘We are going to die… Marthi I love you’, a student is heard saying to her friend. This ran contrary to the repeated declarations from the part of the government that anyone pointing to inflammable materials contributing to the tragedy was engaging in ‘conspiracy theories’
This was the tilting point. The lack of political responsibility along with what could only be seen as a cover up created a broader uproar.
The Association of the Victims’s families decided to call a gathering for Sunday 26 January 2025. The call was made on 22 January, and, pretty soon, it was evident it really resonated with a society where, according to opinion polls, more than 70% believe that there was an attempt to mount a cover up. In the end, as already mentioned, the rallies in Athens and other cities were the biggest since the 2010s. This was a turning point.
The government attempted to react to this by insisting that it has confidence in the Greek judicial system, but, at the same time, there were attempts to smear the relatives of the victims or to re-introduce the accusations about ‘conspiracy theories’. Finally, they opted for rhetoric that basically tried to say that these rallies were part of a conspiracy to create a situation of “chaos” and “destabilisation”, similar to the one of the 2011 movement of the Squares. However, all these proved to be ineffective and the government’s attempt to pre-emptively sabotage the rallies failed.
The publication of the official findings of the HARSIA investigation yet further fuelled the rage. The report details the image of a railway system that was suffering from extreme underfunding, understaffing and lack of safety mechanisms. It points to how the destruction of evidence made it very difficult to actually reconstruct what happened during the accident. It explains why the fireball was not caused by silicone oil but by hydrocarbons carried by one of the trains.
On the morning of the 28 February, the images were without precedent. Once could see people flooding the centre of Athens and Thessaloniki and every city and town in Greece. It was a real general strike, most shops were closed and people that usually refrained from such gatherings felt that they had a moral duty to be other. Trade unions, student unions, school parents’ associations, shop-owners’ associations, municipalities, and athletic clubs had called for mass participation to the rallies. Apart from the extent and size of the demonstrations, what was more overwhelming was this sense that people felt that they had a duty to go to the rallies, this “I have to be there too”. And it was in this sense that history was made.
And they were rallies that were indubitably damaging for the government. Yes, they were not rallies organised by the opposition, nor were they even “pro-opposition”. But they were rallies for justice, for the public good that is safe public transport, against the privatisation of the railways, against what society perceives as a cover-up attempt on the part of the government. This may also explain why, in the end, the government chose the path of repression. Not only to give the image of repression, but also to scare.
But that does not negate what it means to have all these people all over Greece take to the streets. Demonstrations and rallies are not fashionable – let’s not fool ourselves. Greek society is fragmented and individualised. “Don’t go, it will be a mess” is often heard, and many people believe it. Besides, the government and its “friendly media”, the ones read by a very large part of society, made it clear: the rallies are a “conspiracy plan” to “bring down the government”.
Nevertheless, people came to the rallies in such unprecedented numbers despite all this, overcoming all the obstacles to collective action that exist. They came to the rallies because they cannot trust what is being offered to them as ‘government management.’
And it’s not just that they came to the rallies: they will remember for a long time that they came to the rallies. They will feel that this experience left a deep mark on them. They will feel that they were part of history that day. And that will make them think differently from now on.
Why is this happening in Greece? Seemingly, the country is heralded in Europe as a paragon of neoliberal “stability”. After all, a single party safe parliamentary majority based on more than 40% of the vote, is something that most centre-right parties in Europe can only dream of. Especially since this came not only after the Tempi tragedy and the revelations regarding the eavesdropping scandal but also after one of Europe’s worst performances during the pandemic.
But, at the same time, Greece is faced with a deeper social and political crisis. Despite having seemingly stronger growth than most Eurozone countries, this is based more on consumption, tourism and real estate, rather than investment in high value-added sectors. Despite nominal rises, wages measured in purchasing power are of the lowest in Europe leading to a cost-of-living crisis. This is aggravated by the growing signs of a housing crisis especially in bigger cities like Athens, who suffer from Airbnb and increased real-estate speculation, along with the problems in a public health system that is understaffed and underfunded and under constant attack. All this accentuated a deeper sense of insecurity and discontent, clearly visible on opinion polls during the past two months. However, this discontent could not find a political outlet or an alternative, despite a growing crisis of legitimacy. As a result, the paradox of the Greek political landscape is that the ruling New Democracy party had the most solid base, but one that was minoritarian and currently reduced to those that also believe that things move to the right direction or trust the justice system. The strength of the Mitsotakis’s government so far was that the opposition is fragmented and not in the best of shape. New Democracy’s vote is projected to less than 30%, with PASOK at 14%, SYRIZA at 6-7%, the Communist Party at around 9% and the far-right parties are at a total of 15-20% depending on the projection.
It was in this social and political landscape that the Tempi tragedy, and the sense that the government is not only responsible for the policies that made it possible but also for the cover up, acted as a catalyst and also a metonymy for everything that is at the roots of such a deeper social insecurity. Moreover, it is important to note that, despite so many decades of neoliberal policies, there is still a deeply rooted belief in the ability of the state to deliver some basic services such as railway safety. It was this trust that was breached after the train wreck, the refusal of the government to assume the responsibility and the evidence of an attempted cover-up. In contrast to the eavesdropping scandal, where the government was helped by a widespread shrug that this how those in power behave, here this was viewed like a failure to respect a fundamental social contract. This was accentuated by the fact that this struggle is led by the relatives and, in particular, the parents of the victims, and is perceived as transcending the traditional political game. Moreover, this demand for justice, for truth, for “oxygen”, created a space of contestation and aspiration for people to come together in the demonstrations.
It was this process made it visible that the New Democracy government is indeed in a minority position. Because now the majority that is against it is not a statistical average in a poll, against which it could still say ‘I represent stability’. This majority was now an actual reality embodied in the mass rallies.
In other words, the Greek government cannot say that it now represents the only possible alternative to chaos and a broken opposition. Not because the opposition is not fragmented and ineffective, but because the demonstrations and rallies show that the majority wants something else, now feels that it has to declare it openly and certainly does not want this government. This creates a situation of an irrevocably lost real legitimacy.
Obviously, the Mitsotakis government will continue to govern with a parliamentary majority. It will probably survive the no-confidence motion next week. It will probably intensify the repression if there is a continuation of the protests. It will profit from the problematic state of the opposition. It will try to make “concessions”, and the Prime Minister has already pledged that, by 2027, the railways will be fully modernised and safe. They will hope that people will return to their daily concerns (although, of course, these everyday concerns have actually fuelled discontent). They will probably offer some scapegoats, such as having parliament initiate a criminal investigation of the minister responsible for levelling the site of the accident.
But it will be a government with very little real legitimacy, and a society where parts of it, especially the youth, will increasingly ask “what right do you have to decide for me?”. It’s probable that government legislation proposals will now face, on the street, much greater opposition, because at the rallies people felt they had the power.
In essence, the danger will be a dangerous “fuite en avant” on the part of the government. That is, an attempt not to respond to a profound demand for change coming from society, but to “speed up the government’s work” in a direction that lacks real legitimacy and that will appear in the eyes of society as a peculiar coup. And the government may believe that this is a way to ‘buy time’, but, in practice, it will only exacerbate the crisis of legitimacy and the disrepute of the political system, this sense of inability (and very often unwillingness) to respond to the demands of society.
A political system that, in its current arrangement and structure (the one that acquired an outline in the Memoranda era and unfolded even more aggressively after 2019), now reaching its limit, is proving to be “structurally” inadequate to do anything other than serve very specific capitalist interests, without being able to inspire society or mobilise its creative forces or propose a future different from the forced reproduction of the present. It is indeed the dying of the old, to cite Gramsci.
Which means that the current government’s embrace of power, as long as the “new cannot be born”, will lead to a multitude of “morbid phenomena”, to recall Gramsci again. After all, what else is the government’s de facto refusal to effectively investigate the responsibility for the tragedy, or an insistence on a peculiar hatred of all things public?
But, at the same time, the parameter that changes the facts, that makes for a new correlation of forces, is precisely this majoritarian return to the streets, it is the demand for justice and truth, for democracy “oxygen”, and for a life without fear. And, here, the questions are certainly difficult, if one looks at the opposition or the state of the Left (whatever way one defines it). SYRIZA (and, to a certain extent, the New Left[2]) have lost credibility with significant parts of the subaltern strata and are far from being able to present an alternative strategy for government. PASOK, nominally the biggest party in opposition, has failed to present a real alternative and, moreover, a significant segment of it would be comfortable even with an alliance government with New Democracy if an election was inconclusive. The Communist Party, that has played a significant role in the mobilisation, points to the need for changes in an “anticapitalist and antimonopoly direction” but, at the same time, does not currently have a strategy for power. The radical anticapitalist left is more fragmented and lacks any serious strategic debate.
But politics is always an experimental process. And, if one wants to experiment with how this demand for justice and truth is “translated” into hegemonic practice, the unprecedented popular mobilisation offers the terrain. Not to “represent” it, but to learn from it.
And that is where the difficult part begins. But when has change ever been easy?
[1] On Stefanos Kasselakis’s stint as president of SYRIZA see Panagiotis Sotiris, ‘Greece’s Syriza Has Hit the End of the Road’, https://jacobin.com/2025/01/greece-syriza-stefanos-kasselakis-left.
[2] Nea Aristera (New Left) is a political party formed in 2023 by members of SYRIZA that left the party after Stefanos Kasselakis’s election as president of SYRIZA.
