Tempe and the lost year
“At Tempe, our country collided with all that plagues it,” Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said during the no-confidence motion against his government. “On that fateful night, chronic weaknesses of our state joined forces with human error. That is what I said then, this is what I say today.”
This is the essence of the issue. It is, though, a picture of our woes drawn with broad strokes. It lacks the details that combine to shape the tragic whole, the details that we saw in the year that passed since the tragedy, that we saw in last week’s parliamentary debate.
What are the plagues that cause so much pain? What are our state’s weaknesses that make us so vulnerable to the flippancy and incompetence of the last wheel on the wagon? If we start at the top, we see the responsibility of the government and opposition parties which, together, form the political context in which we all live. The present government has proved to be more productive and more effective than most of its predecessors, but this is not enough. The fatal crash at Tempe confirms that Greece’s railway system was not safe. And yet, shortly before the tragedy, the transportation minister assured Parliament of the opposite. Obviously, the man did not want anyone to be hurt, but he did not prevent this from happening.
Perhaps he, his colleagues and subordinates (like most of us who have a say in public life) believed that because not much had gone wrong so far, all would be well. The same mentality led to Greece’s bankruptcy, as politicians, bankers, journalists and many others who ought to have known better blithely observed the country heading for the rocks, perhaps believing that the danger would keep receding, like the horizon.
The lesson of Tempe is that each one of us has to take our responsibility towards each other very seriously. It is not enough that we turn up for work. Then, when things go wrong, we must want to learn the causes, those responsible must be held to account and measures must be taken to prevent this from happening again. Mitsotakis’ government moved in this direction. But when the criticism started coming in, when it felt that it was under attack from relatives of the crash victims and from opposition parties, it resorted to the mentality of previous governments – claiming that others were to blame.
So, it tried to reinforce itself against criticism, rather than working to convince the relatives and all other citizens that the accident at Tempe would mark a turning point in public life, in how such problems were handled. The opposition parties were no help. All of them – to a lesser or greater degree – sowed confusion with exaggerated accusations against the government, with oversimplifications, conspiracy theories and exploitation of people’s pain. Polarization begets polarization, it becomes an end in itself, preventing consensus, blocking solutions to basic problems – such as the need to choose carefully the people in crucial positions, whether they be ministers or station masters, to evaluate their performance and hold them to account.
The night of Tempe reminded us forever how dangerous and unjust our country is. This defeat, like the national bankruptcy, like the emigration of our young, showed us who we are – that even as we feel each other’s pain we persist with behaviors that do not allow us to protect ourselves or others. It showed us that the progress of the past few decades and the recovery to some form of normality after the long crisis are not enough. We are all on the same tracks. If we do not reach a minimal level of agreement, if we remain unaware of the dangers ahead, we will not get far.
