[Giorgos Kydonas/Intime News]
On Friday, many of us will take to the streets to express our anger, our sadness, our concern about our country, about our lives. The disappointment is focused not only on today’s government, nor only on previous governments and opposition parties. It has to do with the fact that all who live here face a difficult reality which ought to be different.
Despite the efforts, the hopes, the sacrifices, we remain hostages of an inability to change, to work methodically and persistently towards building a country in which we can trust the railroads and the judiciary, in which we can trust those who govern and those who keep an eye on them, in which we can trust state officials and our fellow citizens. The people’s rage is the enriched uranium of politics – it can produce energy and progress, or it can lead to weapons of mass destruction, to a balance of terror, to paralysis. Today we face this dilemma. It is not enough to express the just demand for accountability and justice. Each one of us needs to decide how we will become collectively that which we want to be.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ government was elected with a mandate to improve things, and it has handled serious crises (the pandemic, Turkish challenges) with notable success. Today it needs to examine with sincerity and depth how its mishandling of the Tempe tragedy caused the greatest challenge it has faced. Perhaps it will conclude that haste, maintaining political “balances” within the ruling party, and the lack of transparency – all common tools of our politics – are exactly what it should be fighting against rather than exploiting.
As for the opposition parties, the tried and tested tradition of head-on attacks on the government hinders the development of new proposals for dealing with the country’s problems. We need only remember how, through the years, politicians who proposed reforms have been treated, and how different things would be if our politicians and citizens had clear positions on issues rather than succumbing to the vortex of opportunism.
We know our capabilities and our limitations, we can see the dangers, and yet we persist with flying blind. Today, let’s ask ourselves whether we are up to the challenges that we face. Communing in the anniversary of a fresh national tragedy, let’s think not only about where we want to go, but also how we will get there.