The mood in Parliament on March 5, 2025, was grim. Days earlier, a massive demonstration over the Tempi rail disaster had filled Syntagma Square in central Athens. During the debate on setting up a preliminary investigation committee into New Democracy lawmaker and former minister Christos Triantopoulos, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis told lawmakers: “We may consider the so-called ‘indictment’ against him entirely unfounded, but neither he nor the governing majority has any reason not to treat this development with the seriousness it demands, as another avenue that will help bring the real facts to light.”
For months, officials at the prime minister’s office, had been confident that Tempi, however heavy its political cost, could be kept under control. Political responsibility would be examined, institutional procedures would run their course, the courts would do their job and, eventually, the country would be able to move on.
That confidence proved fragile, and the first major crack came not from Parliament or a court document but from the street. On Feb. 28, 2025, two years after a passenger train and a freight train collided near Tempi in central Greece, killing 57 people, hundreds of thousands of protesters flooded Athens and dozens of other cities. Syntagma Square became the center of an unprecedented wave of public mobilization over the crash. It was then that the government’s inner circle understood the case could no longer be treated as just another difficult political crisis that time would eventually defuse.
A Misplaced Sense of Control
Until then, the prime minister’s office had built its strategy largely on the belief that the institutional and political landscape remained manageable. It opted for a parliamentary inquiry, which can examine events but cannot lead to charges against ministers, rather than a preliminary investigative committee. It stressed the railway’s long-standing structural issues and invoked the independence of the judiciary. Together, these formed the pieces of the government’s defense strategy: responsibility would be assigned wherever it emerged, but the government itself would not initiate a process that could put ministers before a special court.
The model held as long as the government believed the case remained in an environment it could manage politically. After the rallies, that was no longer the case.
Before the protersts, there had been revelations about how the crash site was handled, including the controversy over the removal of soil and rubble, the possible loss of evidence and the actions taken by the authorities in the first days after the crash. Then came the report of the Hellenic Air and Rail Accident Investigation Authority (EODASAAM), which documented serious failures in the management of the site and in the search for critical evidence.
The government had every reason to believe the political pressure could be contained. As it turned out, it misjudged how long and how deeply the public would remain enraged by this tragedy.
The Triantopoulos case could no longer be handled on purely political terms. The prime minister’s office accepted the establishment of a preliminary investigative committee and then backed the decision to refer the former deputy minister of civil protection to the judiciary. The move was portrayed as an institutional gesture that rose above partisan noise. Mitsotakis himself had publicly called the charges “entirely unfounded,” and since the government insisted it did not fear the courts, the case had to go before them as quickly as possible.
Behind the scenes, however, lawmakers from New Democracy, were describing a different picture at the time. In private conversations, they said Triantopoulos’s decision to submit his case to the regular courts was tied to a widespread impression that it would not lead to serious legal trouble and that the party official would get off lightly, since the offense he is charged with is a misdemeanor.
The ruling of the Judicial Council, a panel of senior judges that decides whether cases involving ministers go to trial, shattered that illusion. The judges did not agree with the government’s political assessment that the case was “entirely unfounded.” Instead they sent Triantopoulos and four other people to the Special Court on charges of breach of duty. The 204-page document detailing their decision describes the removal of soil, rubble and wreckage as an arbitrary act carried out while the judicial investigation was already underway. That act, the judges found, led to the loss of critical evidence and was intended to benefit people who bore responsibility for the crash.
The ruling stunned the prime minister’s office, because it amounted to far more than the referral of a former deputy minister. According to information from government and parliamentary circles, debate flared again over whether Triantopoulos was becoming the sacrificial lamb in a series of maneuvres. The question was raised not because there is proof of a deliberate decision by the government to “sacrifice” him, but because a growing number of MPs and party officials believe the case to be an example of political (mis)management, as it relied too heavily on the assumption that the judicial outcome could be predicted.
‘Double Standards’
The question that began to circulate was why the belief had taken hold that the government could anticipate the decisions of the courts in a polarized and volatile political climate. The wiretapping scandal, and later the OPEKEPE farm subsidy scandal, had already left their mark, inparticular regarding the way the government treated its own officials, applying “double standards,” as many lawmakers put it.
In the OPEKEPE case, Mitsotakis moved quickly to demand the resignations of the ministers and deputy ministers whose names appeared in case files compiled by the European Public Prosecutor’s Office. Some were later cleared and others were referred to the courts. The cases of Makis Voridis and Lefteris Avgenakis never got that far. The opposition called for a preliminary investigation committee into the two men, but the governing majority voted it down. To secure that outcome, it made improper and extensive use of postal ballots in Parliament, a way of keeping its lawmakers in line amid fears that about 15 New Democracy members might break ranks.
Triantopoulos says he will prove his innocence before the Special Court. Many in New Democracy, however, wonder whether he will remain the sacrificial lamb to the end, taking the blame for others as well. Should the courts treat Kostas Ach. Karamanlis, who was infrastructure and transport minister at the time of the crash, the same way, no one can predict how he would choose to defend himself. All of this has put Tempi back at the center of Greek politics at another critical moment. The tragedy, and the government’s handling of it in the run-up to two national elections, now threatens to upset the prime minister’s office’s election planning in ways it did not foresee.
