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There have been more demonstrations in Greece after Tuesday night’s deadly train crash. An intercity service from Athens carrying more than 350 people smashed into a freight train near the city of Larissa, causing the front carriages to derail and burst into flames. At least 57 people were killed and others are still unaccounted for.

The fall-out from the crash has brought a renewed focus on the era of privatisation that followed Greece's financial crisis, with claims that insufficient funding has dramatically worsened the safety of the country's rail network and the government is facing angry accusations that years of warnings over safety on the rail network were ignored.

Yanis Varoufakis, an economist and Greece's finance minister in 2015 during the midst of the economic crisis, tweeted after the crash: “Now is the moment to grieve and to look after the injured and the victims’ families. But soon we shall bring to Greece’s parliament the underlying issue: yet another tragedy caused by a hideous railway privatisation."

He joined us on Newsday to explain how Greece's lenders at the time of the crisis rejected his plan for the railways and insisted they be broken up and the rolling stock sold off.

"Since the Italian company took over the Greek rolling stock, we've had a litany of comical failures of the system, until of course the comedy turned into tragedy the other day... this is a long, drawn-out process of creating a system whose only absolutely certain outcome was tragedy."

(Photo shows: A rescuer stands on the site of a crash, where two trains collided, near the city of Larissa, Greece, March 3, 2023. Credit: Reuters)

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