By Penelope Galliou

Although the common goal of all the parties and the government is to prevent and shield the country against the threats that now emanate from the climate crisis and that the country has been experiencing in recent days with the uncontrolled fire fronts across the territory, in Parliament confrontation and criticism prevailed, without even in this crisis a common front being “corrected” through proposals and constructive discussion.

A crisis that the prime minister likened to a “war” which, however, does not seem to be ending immediately, as he also spoke of the three difficult days that follow on the front of the fires due to the extreme weather conditions. “We are currently at war, focused solely on the front of the fire. We will rebuild what we lost. We will compensate those who were hit. I do not believe that one can claim that the state is absent from this test. It was present stronger than ever. With more aerial vehicles, more firefighters.”

Simultaneously with the criticality of the moments and the dangerousness of the weather conditions that are not allied with the battle fought with the flames, the Kyriakos Mitsotakis he emphasized that vigilance is required in the coming weeks while he did not fail to talk about the required account which will be done at the appropriate time. “The report will come complete, cool at the right time when we will also do our overall report for the fire fighting season, whether it concerns the operational level and the possible delays in prevention or the causes and the possibility of arsons due to fraud or negligence,” he noted. However, he made a first approach to handling by leaving indirect points for any mayors who did not do their job properly. “The responsibility is shared today. We gave 25 cm from 19 for cleaning and fire protection zones. And at some point we will make the fund and those mayors will know that if there is a resource that should have been absorbed and was not absorbed, this information will be public. Everyone will know this in the run-up to municipal elections. We will not give money from the state budget to someone who does not do the job for which they were given,” he remarked.

Special mention was made by Kyriakos Mitsotakis and at “112” which he described as “precious” because, as he emphasized, “it has saved the lives of thousands of people and our first priority must always be the protection of human life. And this has its own special weight, five years after the tragedy in Mati. If we finally learned anything from this unspeakable tragedy, it was precisely that yes, we do have a way to do organized evacuations safely and be able to protect people from another potential tragedy.” In addition, he said that the Brits who were in Rhodes were surprised by the 112 as it does not exist in the UK. “What we take as self-evident and fortunately acquired and we do the evacuation, is not a simple matter. When well-intentioned criticism is made from a distance, come and see how much can go wrong at any time in such an enterprise,” he countered critics of the frontline manipulations.

The entire opposition is against the government

The president of the SYRIZA parliamentary group, Sokratis Famellos, criticized the government’s actions, who spoke of thousands of gaps in the fire brigade and called for better coordination of firefighting operations. “Instead of upgrading the possibilities with an emphasis on prevention and resilience of society and economy, we had a freeze on forest fire prevention tools that SYRIZA had legislated, we had a freeze on regional plans for resilience of society” argued Mr. Famellos

The president of PASOK, Nikos Androulakis, was equally critical, speaking of the failure of the staff state. “The staff state failed miserably again this year to clear the forests, to build fire protection zones. He did not tell us if he checked how the state resources were utilized by the local government,” he stressed.

Harsh criticism was also made by the governor. of the KKE Dimitris Koutsoubas accusing the government of a lack of prevention. “For an entire island to be flooded with tourists but to burn for days because it has no infrastructure, because you have not taken measures to prevent fires.”

“Every summer and every winter we have disasters attributed to the candy of climate change” said the president of the Spartans, Vassilis Stigas, while the president of the Hellenic Solution Kyriakos Velopoulos argued that “if there was an honest government someone would have resigned already” considering that there is political responsibility in the management of the fires. The head of Niki, Dimitris Natsios, noted that “the future of the entire homeland is engulfed in flames and the state is looking at destruction like a modern Nero” and the president of Freedom of Movement, Zoe Konstantopoulou, argued that “despite the repeated tragedies, the repeated losses, the state does not learn”.
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