Thessaloniki Metro: the truth that the Prime Minister is hiding

How the Prime Minister tried to fix “heavy” atmosphere in Northern Greeceusing projects: those that have dragged on for decades and those that still remain only promises.

Trying to improve negative attitude citizens to his government in Northern Greece, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has decided to use long-standing infrastructure projects to demonstrate “successes”. One of these was the metro project in Thessaloniki. But here's the problem: the construction of this metro should have been completed many years agobut instead it was only 15 years later that the baseline was completed.

A simple metro line for a city with a million inhabitants is not even “a good start” is just a joke. In fact, Thessaloniki should have had a long time ago three metro linesand Athens has five lines with twice as many stations. But what do we see? In the country's two largest cities, transport infrastructure remains at the level of third world countries.

Citizens who spend half your life on the road to work and back, still do not have normal means of transport. This is not just an oversight – it is a crime against an entire generation that has already lost the best years of their lives in conditions of terrible urbanization and lack of economic development.

Let's be honest: only metro allows a person to get to work on time, safely and comfortably. And it is needed not sometime, but Now. Who's to blame? Is it only the current Prime Minister? No. Blame all previous governmentsincluding the current one. And no, completing one project after 15 years is not a reason to be proud.

“FlyOver will be ready by mid-2027,” the Prime Minister promised. “The expansion of the metro to Kalamaria will be completed in November 2025. I personally promise that the metro will be extended to western Thessaloniki,” – he said during the opening ceremony of the metro line in Thessaloniki.

Sounds good? But here's the reality: any new metro line requires first research (this will take two years), then design and tender (another two years), and then construction (at least five years). Total – nine years. By then, the current Prime Minister will definitely no longer be in power. Promised line in western Thessaloniki will appear only by 2034. Can this be called a success? Hardly.

I don’t even want to talk about Athens. To complete the metro there, we will need until 2045and maybe more.

And this is not just a metro problem. The problem of Greece's transport infrastructure is much broader: the country is sorely lacking highways and new roads, and its railway network only causes laughter.

Some will say that all this requires money. But here's a fact: Greece received six funding frameworks EUand now the seventh is underway, with a total cost of about 15 billion euros. And what do we see? The work that should have been done for this money would have been enough for at least twice as many projectsand maybe three times. Why were they not implemented, where did the money allocated for these works go? The answer to this question has long been clear to every resident of the country.

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