Athens: Greece’s conservative government on Sunday defeated a censure vote in parliament over its handling of a snowstorm that buried a key Athens motorway and left thousands without electricity for days.
The motion brought forward by main opposition leader Alexis Tsipras fell nine votes short, with just 142 lawmakers in the 300-seat parliament in favor. Tsipras, the former prime minister who was beaten by Mitsotakis in the 2019 national elections, has called the government’s response to the Monday snowstorm that buried Athens and other parts of Greece a “fiasco”.
“Resign and call for elections,” he told the PM in parliament Sunday, accusing the government of also failing in its management of the pandemic and its response to mounting energy prices. “Greece needs a government of honesty, democracy, and progress,” Tsipras said.
Thousands of Athenians were trapped in their cars for hours around the capital and on the Attiki Odos ring road, the privately-run motorway into the city.
Ministers said prior assurances from the motorway’s managers that there was enough heavy machinery to clear the snow was excessively optimistic, and the company’s chief operating officer resigned in response.
The blizzard also knocked out power in around 200,000 households and businesses in the capital, many of them for nearly a week, with regional and local officials trading accusations for failing to mobilize quickly enough to clear fallen trees and snow.
The storm also damaged bird cages at the Attica Zoological Park, leading to the escape of two Eurasian eagle-owls and 30 Waldrapp Ibises, the park said. Civil protection minister Christos Stylianidis, the former EU crisis management commissioner, on Saturday said Greece lacked “modern tools” to tackle climate challenges.
“We need modern radar and early warning systems,” he told parliament. “If we had them, and our meteorologists had them, we could have known the amount of snow (coming),” he said.
“The climate crisis found us all unprepared.”
Mitsotakis has said Greece — habitually hit by earthquakes and summer wildfires — will invest 1.7 billion euros ($1.9 billion) in civil protection infrastructure. In his response to his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic that has cost over 23,000 lives, the prime minister said 84 percent of Greeks over the age of 18 are now vaccinated.