Latest news with #PASOK
Al Jazeera
05-03-2025
- Politics
- Al Jazeera
Greek government to face no-confidence vote over 2023 deadly train crash
Greek opposition parties have submitted a motion to trigger a no-confidence vote against the government over its handling of a deadly 2023 train crash, days after protesters brought the country to a standstill to press their demands for political accountability. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets across the country on Friday to mark the second anniversary of the crash, demanding justice for the victims. Fifty-seven people, mostly students, were killed in the disaster. Nikos Androulakis, the leader of the socialist PASOK party, said on Wednesday the motion was filed over the government's 'criminal incompetence'. Three left-wing parties supported the decision, including Syriza, New Left and Course of Freedom. The vote will be held on Friday. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, whose government holds 156 seats out of 300 in parliament and is expected to survive the motion, said it would threaten the country's political stability. 'I have an obligation to keep the country steady and safe in this uncertain climate,' Mitsotakis told parliament. He accused the opposition of spreading a 'storm' of misinformation. 'There never was a [cover-up],' Mitsotakis said, referring to the claims as a 'colourful collection of myths, fantasies and lies.' The rail crash occurred on February 28, 2023, when a train from Athens to Thessaloniki carrying more than 350 passengers collided with a freight train near the city of Larissa. The two trains had travelled towards each other on the same track for miles without triggering any alarms. The accident was blamed on faulty equipment and human error. Opposition parties said the government had ignored repeated signs and warnings that Greece's railways were underfunded and accident-prone. Relatives of the crash victims have also criticised the government for not initiating or supporting an inquiry into political responsibility. Last week, the Air and Rail Accident Investigation Authority (HARISA) reported that the crash was caused by chronic safety shortfalls that needed to be addressed to prevent a repeat. On Tuesday, parliament voted to launch an investigation into whether senior official Christos Triantopoulos, who went to the scene of the crash after the accident, authorised the bulldozing of the site, which led to the loss of crucial evidence. Triantopoulos, who resigned on Tuesday, dismissed all allegations and said he oversaw relief efforts. Despite the government refuting claims of a cover-up, opinion polls in the country have found that a large majority of Greeks believe that the government tried to hide evidence.
Yahoo
27-01-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Costas Simitis, Greek leader who stabilised the economy and paved the way for the 2004 Olympics
Costas Simitis, who has died aged 88, was the prime minister who bolstered Greece's self-esteem by taking it into the eurozone and preparing Athens for the 2004 Olympic Games, sealing the country's reintegration into the international community and removing what remained of the stain of military rule between 1967 and 1974. During his eight years as head of the socialist PASOK government he stabilised an economy which under Andreas Papandreou had suffered from high inflation, a near tripling of public debt and average annual growth of below one per cent. Although Simitis's economic data were questioned by the conservative New Democracy government which took power in 2004, he did succeed in reducing inflation and debt and in boosting growth. With modernisation as its byword, his programme was based on extensive public investment and economic and labour reforms, including part-privatisation, particularly in the banking sector, of a heavily statist economy. These changes enabled the country to fully substitute the euro for the drachma in 2002. The hosting of the Olympics, which took place shortly after Simitis had resigned, was seen as a welcome homecoming in the country of its birthplace and its inaugural revival in 1896. But the legacy of these achievements undid much of the kudos gained from them, and presented the European Union with its greatest crisis to date. Greece was found to have falsified its finances to join the eurozone, with a budget deficit much more than the three per cent of GDP permitted and public debt exceeding 100 per cent, far above the 60 per cent limit. During the global banking crisis of 2009 and its aftermath, the state of Greece's public finances would lead to the reduction of the country's sovereign debt to junk status; repeated bail-outs from the International Monetary fund (IMF) and the European Union, with draconian austerity measures as a quid pro quo; the eruption on to the political scene in 2015 of the Left-wing, anti-austerity party Syriza, breaking the dominance of PASOK and New Democracy; and Greece becoming the first developed nation to default to the IMF. A taste of the suffering to come had already been evident in 2005, when the European Commission put Greece under fiscal monitoring after the state had spent more than €9 billion on the Olympics, pushing the deficit to over six per cent and the debt to more than 110 per cent of GDP. It was also during Simitis's time in office that the Treaty of Accession of Cyprus to the EU was signed, a step which was championed by the Greek government but which virtually destroyed any chance of reunification with the Turkish-occupied north of the island. Both Papandreou and Simitis were academics-turned-politicians who were forced into exile by their opposition to the Greek military junta. Papandreou, an economist, was arrested by the colonels and charged with treason, then released to go into exile in Sweden and Canada. Simitis, who taught law, left for Germany after planting bombs on the streets of Athens. He became a member of the Panhellenic Liberation Movement, founded by Papandreou, and after returning to Greece in 1974 co-founded the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) with Papandreou. Under Papandreou, Simitis held the portfolio of agriculture from 1981 to 1985, of the economy from 1985 to 1987 and of industry, energy, research and technology from 1993 to 1995. For less than three months, in 1989-90, he was education and religious affairs minister under the interim non-party leadership of Xenophon Zolotas. Simitis's wide ministerial experience made him a leading candidate to succeed Papandreou when the latter resigned due to ill health in January 1996. PASOK MPs elected him prime minister, with Papandreou remaining head of the party until his death in June. Simitis succeeded him in that post before leading PASOK to victory in a general election in September, when it won 162 of the 300 seats. A further victory, by a narrower margin, followed in 2000. When he stepped down in 2004, he had completed the longest continuous term of any modern Greek prime minister, though Papandreou, over three terms, had been longer in power. Despite their shared experience, the two men were very different, and relations between them were strained. Papandreou was part-populist, part-visionary, stirring hearts and minds with his inflammatory rhetoric; he was also capricious and ill-disciplined. By comparison, Simitis was respected as competent but seen as dull. The reputations of both suffered because of corruption within their administrations. The most notorious cases under Simitis, to do with arms purchases, inculpated his defence minister, Akis Tsochatzopoulos, who in 2013 was sentenced to 20 years in prison for money-laundering. In January 2004, with PASOK support collapsing, Simitis announced that he would resign as party leader and not stand for re-election as prime minister in the forthcoming parliamentary poll. He was succeeded in the first post by George Papandreou, the foreign minister and son of Andreas, who lost the elections in March to New Democracy under Kostas Karamanlis. Konstantinos Georghiu Simitis was born on June 23 1936 in Piraeus to Georgios, a professor of economic and commercial sciences in Athens, and Fani Christopoulou, a feminist activist. His elder brother Spiros, who died in 2023 and spent most of his life as a jurist in Germany, was known as 'the father of data protection'. Costas attended the University of Marburg in Germany and the London School of Economics and returned to Greece in 1965. There, he was one of the founding members of a political research group which after the military coup in April 1967 became Democratic Defence, in opposition to the junta. It was then that he was involved in bomb-planting, an activity he would acknowledge much later on Greek television. He served as agriculture minister without being an MP, then was elected to parliament in 1985, for Piraeus, remaining until 2009. He resigned as economy minister in 1987 because he felt that Papandreou was undermining the austerity programme which he, Simitis, had been appointed to implement. Another disagreement with the prime minister in 1995 led to his giving up the industry portfolio. Relations were no easier between Simitis and Papandreou's son, George, with whom he fell out over the latter's wish to hold a referendum on the Treaty of Lisbon, which gave the EU a full legal personality, enabling it to sign international treaties. Before resigning as an MP, Simitis warned, correctly, that financial profligacy would result in an austerity regime being imposed by the IMF. Simitis is survived by his wife, Daphne, née Arkadiou, like him a student at the LSE, whom he married in 1964. They had two daughters. Costas Simitis, born June 23 1936, died January 5 2025
Yahoo
27-01-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Costas Simitis, Greek leader who stabilised the economy and paved the way for the 2004 Olympics
Costas Simitis, who has died aged 88, was the prime minister who bolstered Greece's self-esteem by taking it into the eurozone and preparing Athens for the 2004 Olympic Games, sealing the country's reintegration into the international community and removing what remained of the stain of military rule between 1967 and 1974. During his eight years as head of the socialist PASOK government he stabilised an economy which under Andreas Papandreou had suffered from high inflation, a near tripling of public debt and average annual growth of below one per cent. Although Simitis's economic data were questioned by the conservative New Democracy government which took power in 2004, he did succeed in reducing inflation and debt and in boosting growth. With modernisation as its byword, his programme was based on extensive public investment and economic and labour reforms, including part-privatisation, particularly in the banking sector, of a heavily statist economy. These changes enabled the country to fully substitute the euro for the drachma in 2002. The hosting of the Olympics, which took place shortly after Simitis had resigned, was seen as a welcome homecoming in the country of its birthplace and its inaugural revival in 1896. But the legacy of these achievements undid much of the kudos gained from them, and presented the European Union with its greatest crisis to date. Greece was found to have falsified its finances to join the eurozone, with a budget deficit much more than the three per cent of GDP permitted and public debt exceeding 100 per cent, far above the 60 per cent limit. During the global banking crisis of 2009 and its aftermath, the state of Greece's public finances would lead to the reduction of the country's sovereign debt to junk status; repeated bail-outs from the International Monetary fund (IMF) and the European Union, with draconian austerity measures as a quid pro quo; the eruption on to the political scene in 2015 of the Left-wing, anti-austerity party Syriza, breaking the dominance of PASOK and New Democracy; and Greece becoming the first developed nation to default to the IMF. A taste of the suffering to come had already been evident in 2005, when the European Commission put Greece under fiscal monitoring after the state had spent more than €9 billion on the Olympics, pushing the deficit to over six per cent and the debt to more than 110 per cent of GDP. It was also during Simitis's time in office that the Treaty of Accession of Cyprus to the EU was signed, a step which was championed by the Greek government but which virtually destroyed any chance of reunification with the Turkish-occupied north of the island. Both Papandreou and Simitis were academics-turned-politicians who were forced into exile by their opposition to the Greek military junta. Papandreou, an economist, was arrested by the colonels and charged with treason, then released to go into exile in Sweden and Canada. Simitis, who taught law, left for Germany after planting bombs on the streets of Athens. He became a member of the Panhellenic Liberation Movement, founded by Papandreou, and after returning to Greece in 1974 co-founded the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) with Papandreou. Under Papandreou, Simitis held the portfolio of agriculture from 1981 to 1985, of the economy from 1985 to 1987 and of industry, energy, research and technology from 1993 to 1995. For less than three months, in 1989-90, he was education and religious affairs minister under the interim non-party leadership of Xenophon Zolotas. Simitis's wide ministerial experience made him a leading candidate to succeed Papandreou when the latter resigned due to ill health in January 1996. PASOK MPs elected him prime minister, with Papandreou remaining head of the party until his death in June. Simitis succeeded him in that post before leading PASOK to victory in a general election in September, when it won 162 of the 300 seats. A further victory, by a narrower margin, followed in 2000. When he stepped down in 2004, he had completed the longest continuous term of any modern Greek prime minister, though Papandreou, over three terms, had been longer in power. Despite their shared experience, the two men were very different, and relations between them were strained. Papandreou was part-populist, part-visionary, stirring hearts and minds with his inflammatory rhetoric; he was also capricious and ill-disciplined. By comparison, Simitis was respected as competent but seen as dull. The reputations of both suffered because of corruption within their administrations. The most notorious cases under Simitis, to do with arms purchases, inculpated his defence minister, Akis Tsochatzopoulos, who in 2013 was sentenced to 20 years in prison for money-laundering. In January 2004, with PASOK support collapsing, Simitis announced that he would resign as party leader and not stand for re-election as prime minister in the forthcoming parliamentary poll. He was succeeded in the first post by George Papandreou, the foreign minister and son of Andreas, who lost the elections in March to New Democracy under Kostas Karamanlis. Konstantinos Georghiu Simitis was born on June 23 1936 in Piraeus to Georgios, a professor of economic and commercial sciences in Athens, and Fani Christopoulou, a feminist activist. His elder brother Spiros, who died in 2023 and spent most of his life as a jurist in Germany, was known as 'the father of data protection'. Costas attended the University of Marburg in Germany and the London School of Economics and returned to Greece in 1965. There, he was one of the founding members of a political research group which after the military coup in April 1967 became Democratic Defence, in opposition to the junta. It was then that he was involved in bomb-planting, an activity he would acknowledge much later on Greek television. He served as agriculture minister without being an MP, then was elected to parliament in 1985, for Piraeus, remaining until 2009. He resigned as economy minister in 1987 because he felt that Papandreou was undermining the austerity programme which he, Simitis, had been appointed to implement. Another disagreement with the prime minister in 1995 led to his giving up the industry portfolio. Relations were no easier between Simitis and Papandreou's son, George, with whom he fell out over the latter's wish to hold a referendum on the Treaty of Lisbon, which gave the EU a full legal personality, enabling it to sign international treaties. Before resigning as an MP, Simitis warned, correctly, that financial profligacy would result in an austerity regime being imposed by the IMF. Simitis is survived by his wife, Daphne, née Arkadiou, like him a student at the LSE, whom he married in 1964. They had two daughters. Costas Simitis, born June 23 1936, died January 5 2025 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. 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