Greeks strike to mark train crash anniversary and demand justice

Thousands of striking Greek workers and students have marched through central Athens to mark the first anniversary of the country’s deadliest train crash – and demand justice and bigger pay rises.

The 24-hour strike on Wednesday halted rail services across the country and disrupted urban transport in the Greek capital. Ships were held up in ports near Athens as rail and hospital workers, ship and ferry crews and schoolteachers all walked off the job.

Some of those marching in Athens held up a black banner reading: “We don’t forget – we demand justice.”

On February 28, 2023, a passenger train from Athens to the northern city of Thessaloniki collided head-on with a freight train, killing 57 people and stirring mass protests over what many viewed as the result of decades of neglect of the rail sector.

Churches across the country rang their bells 57 times on Wednesday, to represent the number of those killed, many of them students returning home after a long weekend.

The strike was called by Greece’s largest public sector union, ADEDY, which represents about half a million workers.

But other protesters joined the march, including students, who wrote the names of the dead on the ground in front of the heavily guarded parliament.

There were brief clashes between police and protesters in Athens and in a similar protest in Thessaloniki.

Hours after last year’s crash, a station master was arrested. Dozens of people have since been charged in the case, currently under investigation by a local judge. The government says a trial is likely to begin in June.

But many survivors and victims’ relatives said politicians, who are protected under Greek law from prosecution with only parliament able to investigate them, should also assume responsibility for safety system deficiencies.

“Fifty-seven souls want justice,” read a placard at the site of the crash in the central Greek region of Tempi, where grieving families and survivors held a memorial service, laying white flowers and wreaths.

“Greece must never experience again such a blow to safety and citizens’ confidence,” President Katerina Sakellaropoulou said.

After the crash, the conservative government had promised to reform the railways and make them safer. But a year on, crash experts and railway officials told the Reuters news agency that safety systems are still not fully functioning.

“As a prime minister, as a citizen and as a father, I share the country’s grief,” Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said in a televised address on Wednesday, promising to heal the state’s chronic shortcomings.

“Our mission is to turn the pain into action.”

Demonstrators also protested against what they said were insufficient pay rises, the first after 14 years in the public sector. They said the increases are not big enough to offset the impact of rising living costs. Workers want a 10 percent across-the-board pay rise instead and more hiring.

Greece has been recovering from a decade-long debt crisis and three international bailouts, which it received in return for cutting wages and scrapping holiday bonuses in the public sector.

The conservative government has increased the minimum monthly salary by 20 percent to 780 euros ($844) since it took office in 2019 and has promised to lift it to 950 euros by 2027.

But the country’s monthly salaries still lag behind the European Union average.