Years of disasters, scandals, failures fuel Greece's rail crash protests

By Renee Maltezou

ATHENS (Reuters) - Evi Tsapari is slowly healing from the trauma of escaping bloodied through the window of a burning passenger train after a collision that left dozens dead in central Greece in 2023. But she says she is 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.

"I feel somewhat cheated and fooled," Tsapari told Reuters.

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 centre-right government, which came to power in 2019, deny wrongdoing in the train crash. He says institutions remain strong under his watch.

"The rule of law is stronger than ever in our country," he said last month.

CHANGE BLOCKED

Two years after the train crash, safety gaps remain, said Greece's Air and Rail Accident Investigation Authority last month. 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. 

Tsapari, like many others, pinned her hopes on the constitution that allows citizens to propose legislation to parliament if they gather 500,000 signatures. The petition she signed had nearly three times that number, but the clause she was counting on is dormant because the government has not issued an act to implement it, legal experts said.

"I don't believe that the powerful will ever let things change," said Tsapari. 

BROKEN TRUST

Critics say trust in politicians was broken long before the 2023 rail disaster.

"This is not just about the train crash, it is about the way the government and the justice system has handled it," said Eva Cosse, senior researcher at Human Rights Watch in Athens. "The crash highlighted deep-seated problems with governance and accountability and the rule of law."

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 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.

"We will burn, we'll drown, we'll be killed and no one will be held responsible," said Kalli Anagnostou, a survivor of the 2018 Mati blaze.

SCANDALS

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. Dozens of phones, including those of politicians and journalists, were found to be infected with surveillance software. 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.

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.

"We have no expectation that at some point within a reasonable time our case will be treated fairly," said lawyer Alexandros Papasteriopoulos, who represents relatives of the Mati fire victims. "Politicians are untouchable."

(Reporting by Renee Maltezou and Alexandros Avramidis; Editing by Edward McAllister and Alex Richardson)