By Alexandros Avramidis
THESSALONIKI, Greece, May 22 (Reuters) – Maria Karystianou, a doctor whose daughter died in Greece’s worst train crash in 2023, launched a political party on Thursday as she seeks to harness widespread frustration against Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ government.
Karystianou emerged as a leading justice campaigner for victims of the Tempi train crash that killed 57 people, including her 20-year-old daughter Marthi, and stoked deep mistrust of Greece’s political class.
Last year, Karystianou helped bring hundreds of thousands of people on to the streets across Greece in the biggest rallies in years demanding justice over the crash.
A trial is under way involving 36 defendants, including a station master, rail managers and former railway operator executives, on charges ranging from traffic disruption that led to the deaths to negligent manslaughter and causing bodily harm.
No politicians have faced charges and victims’ relatives have accused the government of a cover-up, which the government denies.
POLLS SUGGEST PARTY COULD ENTER PARLIAMENT
On Thursday, Karystianou launched “Hope for Democracy” in a packed cinema theatre in Thessaloniki. Opinion polls suggest it could enter parliament and help fill a void in Greece’s fragmented opposition as the country heads for an election in the coming 12 months.
“I realised that there was no room for remaining uninvolved, for being indifferent,” Karystianou, 53, told Reuters. Her goal: “To fight for what they stripped me of, the implementation of the law.”
Karystianou, a paediatrician, has no previous experience in politics. In a media interview in January she said that she was split on the issue of abortion, comments that leftist opposition parties said posed a danger to women’s legal rights. She later clarified that she recognises a woman’s right to choose.
Still, Karystianou says her inexperience is an advantage in a political system dominated by “cockfights” between political opponents who implement the same policies when they take power.
On Thursday, as people watched inside the theatre and on a big screen outside, she promised to focus on transport safety, health and education reform, fighting corruption and promoting transparency in state contracts and the banking system.
In a survey by Alco pollsters for Alpha TV this month, 15% of respondents said they would consider voting for a party launched by Karystianou.
If translated into votes, that could make her a powerful politician, especially as Mitsotakis’ party slips in the polls, weighed down by corruption scandals and also the Tempi train crash, which investigators blamed on safety failures and decades of neglect of Greece’s railways.
Mitsotakis’ New Democracy party stands at 23% to 29%, polls show, the strongest showing but far below the 41% he secured in the last election in 2023. The prime minister has pledged to modernise the railway network and to review ministers’ legal immunity.
“I stand before you today, not because I followed a political path. I did not grow up in a party machine, I do not belong to political families,” she told the crowd, in a likely nod to Mitsotakis and other politicians who are part of political dynasties.
“I stand here today as a mother, as a citizen in this country… as a person who was forced to confront head-on the ills that we have all been experiencing for years, but few name.”
(Additional reporting by Renee Maltezou; Editing by Edward McAllister and Alex Richardson)
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