A view of a closed path in the village of Fira, as the increased seismic activity continues on the island of Santorini, Greece, February 7. [Louisa Gouliamaki/Reuters]
One phenomenon shaking the ground beneath our feet is physical and it is activating existing fault-lines; the other is social and it is creating new rifts. Neither is focused on just one island or just one area.
Santorini is the one getting hit directly but Greece is shaking as a whole. Then there’s the tremors coming from the 2023 Tempe rail disaster, which were reactivated by mass protests rallies all over Greece and abroad. Like the actual earthquakes in the Aegean Sea, this phenomenon, too, is creating an audible roar. Is it a threatening roar, though?
Recent public opinion polls have found that 74% of citizens (or about seven in 10) believe that the government has attempted a cover-up in connection with the deadly train collision. This percentage may be mostly due to the fact that the ratio among respondents who belong to the left is 100%, but at 75% it is also significant among those who say they vote for the right.
What these numbers point to is a climate of suspicion, of fissures in the social fabric, of trust deficits.
The problem is that even if the prime minister “escaped” to Santorini on Friday to get away from the fallout from Tempe, as he’s being accused of doing, the claim is finding fertile ground to take root in. And even if he had stayed put in Athens, critics would have found some other reason to lash out at him following Friday’s mass student protests over the Tempe incident.
In short, he can’t get away from the fault line, no matter how much his office tries to play the issue down. The Tempe protests may have caused the big jolt, but smaller temblors have been going on for some time now. The government believed it could manage or even absorb them with some clever communication – it was wrong, as it turns out.
Speaking at an event at the institute he has established, former leftist prime minister Alexis Tsipras recently noted that “things do not look good out there, not even for the opposition – regardless of who’s right and who’s wrong.” He is said to have been referring to the various, divergent initiatives being taken on the Tempe issue. Referring specifically to the parties of the center-left, he accused them of “being unable to even walk to the tune in Parliament,” and appeared less than hopeful of them being able to earn citizens’ trust.
The question, therefore, is where does “trust” go when it’s lost? We already know that it seeks shelter in the dangerously extreme and widely antisystemic far-right. But there are also the darkest, uncharted recesses of anger to account for, the chasms that generate earth-shattering earthquakes.
