ATHENS (Reuters) – Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis will announce a cabinet reshuffle in the coming days, five government officials told Reuters on Thursday, as he seeks to shore up support following mass protests over a deadly 2023 train crash.
Mitsotakis is expected to replace finance minister Kostis Hatzidakis, four of the officials said. Transport minister Christos Staikouras will also step down and a deputy minister is likely to be tasked with supervising reform of Greece’s railways, one of the officials said.
The reshuffle, which is expected by Saturday, comes weeks after hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets demanding justice over Greece’s worst ever rail disaster, in which 57 people died, most of them students.
It was Greece’s biggest protest in years and has shaken Mitsotakis’ centre-right government, which has slipped in the opinion polls. Last week the government survived a vote of no confidence over the issue.
The government promised to reform the railways when it won re-election in 2023, after the crash, but progress has been slow.
The safety gaps that caused the crash have not been filled two years on, a state inquiry found last month, and no one has been convicted over the accident. A separate judicial investigation is underway and is expected to conclude this year.
(Reporting by Renee Maltezou and Lefteris Papadimas; Editing by Edward McAllister and Gareth Jones)
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