Grief over rail disaster brings anger back to Greece's streets

Until recently, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the Greek prime minister, appeared unassailable.

- Helena Smith

He was the poster boy of the European centre-right: the politician who had kept opponents at bay while, elsewhere, populism had cannibalised mainstream conservatism; the technocrat who had ushered in an era of stability and reform after years of economic and social crisis.

Twenty months into his second term, a wave of protest over a train crash — on a scale not seen in decades — could not have been predicted. Nor, perhaps, could the cries of “resign!” that resonated from the crowd outside the Athens parliament on Friday as MPs called Mitsotakis a “danger to democracy” before a late-night vote of confidence in his government.

In a rare show of unity, four leftwing opposition parties had brought the motion, bonded by the conviction that the government had failed to accept responsibility for numerous rail safety failures identified by investigators. After three days of raucous debate, the ruling party's majority ensured the vote went the prime minister’s way. But the charges of incompetence and chicanery, the sense of a cover-up underpinning the government's handling of the disaster, will not be as easy to control.