MPs vote on no confidence motion; PM attacks adversaries
Voting on the opposition’s proposal of no confidence in the government began at around 10.30 p.m. Thursday, at least an hour and a half later than scheduled.
Concluding the three-day debate in Parliament, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis hit back at the opposition, calling their motion “unacceptable” and “inappropriate” and denouncing their “brutal attempt” to take advantage of the widespread grief for the February 28, 2023, Tempe rail disaster that he said went far beyond the families of the 57 dead and the hundreds of injures train passengers.
“They tried to turn grief into a party banner” Mitsotakis said of the opposition.
For the accident itself, which opposition speakers insisted on calling a “crime,” Mitsotakis said it was the moment where the state’s longstanding structural deficiencies met human error.
As for the article in Sunday newspaper To Vima that prompted socialist PASOK leader Nikos Androulakis to table the no-confidence motion, Mitsotakis said it was misleading, that the events it described – a purported montage of communications that served to highlight the stationmaster’s responsibility for the disaster – had been reported long ago by state TV ERT and that his government was not involved.
“It is legitimate for businesspeople and publishers to want to influence politics… Some have been elected President, or Prime Minister… Let them get into the arena themselves and not by proxy,” Mitsotakis said, implying that Androulakis had foreknowledge of the Sunday paper’s article. It is standard journalistic practice, he said, to call authorities ahead of publication and ask for their reaction. Only this time, it was the opposition that was contacted.
Mocking his opponents, Mitsotakis said the real author of the motion, who was not present during his speech, was far-right Greek Solution party leader Kyriakos Velopoulos “whose conspiracy theories you have adopted.”
Mitsotakis addressed at length one of those theories, that authorities filled in the site to conceal evidence. He said the decision to fill in under the passenger train was taken by rescue crews in order to lift the train and gain access to the bodies crushed underneath it.
On the accusation that the government is shielding then-transport minister Kostas Karamanlis, Mitsotakis replied that the opposition can bring a proposal to indict Karamanlis on specific charges and that the Parliament would decide whether to send the case to judicial authorities. He said that changes to the law on ministerial responsibility had made it more difficult to dismiss such cases by invoking the statute of limitations.
The fact, remains, however, that prosecuting a minister remains a lengthy and complicated procedure that is highly unlikely to succeed.
