By Paschos Mandravelis
Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ criticism (parroted by many others) that the opposition parties have no proposals on how to resolve the long-standing problems of the country’s railway is unfair. The InSocial institute of the main opposition party, PASOK, held two workshops last year full of proposals, in which very interesting things were heard, such as, for example, that “for freight trains, speed is not the main criterion. The cost of the route is the main factor in choosing a means of transport. Especially for the railway, the efficiency of transhipments is also a criterion… COSCO states that the minimum desired average commercial speed on the Central Europe-Piraeus axis is 75 km/h,” as transportation engineer Vassilis Evmolpidis said at one of the events on December 9.
At the time of the 2023 train collision at Tempe, in central Greece, the commercial train was traveling at 100 km/h.
But the injustice does not consist of the half-truths or outright lies with which the government has flooded the public debate – it is structural.
First, it has to do with the imbalance of resources (money, people, party structures etc) that the government has in relation to the opposition parties. For example, in 2019, the election program of the then opposition New Democracy had just four lines about the railways: “We invest in high-speed railways with the completion of the electric propulsion, remote control and signaling systems on the central railway line (Patra, Athens, Thessaloniki, Evzonoi, Promachonas) and the new lowland drawing of the Thessaloniki-Kavala line.” None of this has been finished yet, but that is not the issue here.
The constitutional job of the opposition is to control the actions of the government. That is the only reason we pay them, and not to make proposals
During the same period, in February 2019, the then transport minister, SYRIZA’s Christos Spirtzis, presented the “National Strategic Transport Plan of Greece,” the summary of which alone is 67 pages. It is the plan that SYRIZA leader Sokratis Famellos boasted about in Parliament during Wednesday’s debate about Tempe. The difference between New Democracy and SYRIZA in 2019 is that the then leftist government could use the resources of the European Investment Bank and the National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF) to finance this gigantic proposal.
The second structural imbalance of resources between governments and opposition parties in Greece has to do with the role of both. The constitutional job of the opposition is to control the actions of the government. That is the only reason we pay them, and not to make proposals. If, of course, a party wants to become the government, citizens will ask for their proposals. But their institutional role does not require them to do so. To be clear, it is good to have proposals for everything and from everyone, even from coalition officials. But it is unfair for the government to counter every criticism of its actions leveled against it with the argument “And what do you propose?”
The third element of imbalance between a ruling party and those of the opposition has to do with the government’s constant involvement in everything. The government – as its role requires – must react to every problem that appears in everyday life; even its inaction is a reaction. In this way, the government’s actions automatically become the ruling party’s proposals. Proof of this is the fervor with which all party cadres support them. For example, if the decision to fill the site of the train crash with gravel and concrete had not had legal complications, it would have been used as an argument by New Democracy in its election campaign as a proposal for effective crisis management. Now, it is a simply a “bad moment” that was done “for a good reason.”
Therefore, a government, because it is constantly doing something, is a “machine” for generating positions for its party. The opposition, as a result of its role, struggles to evaluate or criticize the government’s actions, embellishing its criticism with fragments of proposals, since it does not have the people, money, structures or even the information available to the government about the problem that is currently in the news.
Source: Kathimerini
