Maria Katsounaki

What is the profile of an “undecided” voter? Can one accurately describe the age, gender, social origin, and causes that create one, or whether the underlying profile of that person is anti-systemic or moderate and centrist?

Is remembering a good thing, or should the past stay in the past? The season brings back painful memories and a lot of sincere concern for the future of Attica – indeed, for the future of the country. And this look back happens to concern the same time frame, a period that was critical for Greece.

Let's say that we were to divest our vocabulary of the words “shock,” “shockwaves” and other derivatives? Overuse of such terms is not just a sign of awkwardness; it shows that certain lines have been crossed, leaving us with nothing else to say. A lot of the events taking place around us – if not actually defining our day-to-day lives to a degree – are indeed “shocking.”

The fact that teenage delinquency is out of control has been discussed for years; it did not come up relatively recently, nor did it take the excellent – and painful – British series “Adolescence” to make us realize how unfamiliar the world of today’s 13-year-olds is to us.

“I honestly have no idea what's going on over there. I do know what's going on over here though, and I can tell you that, from a fascism perspective, this has been a really great year,” said American TV host Jimmy Kimmel on Britain's Channel 4. The channel assigned him the “Alternative Christmas message” this year. Kimmel, let's remember, is a star of the famous Late Night show, which was briefly suspended (because of US President Donald Trump), but returned.

Should we talk about Georgis Grigorakis and “Digger,” Yorgos Zois and “Arcadia,” or Theo Angelopoulos and his “Trilogy” project, cut short by his tragic death? Or what about Dimitris Nakos' “Meat” that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2024, or the unforgettable documentary by Filippos Koutsaftis, “Mourning Rock,” a tribute to the West Attica town of Elefsina that took more than 10 years to make and was first screened in 2000, beautifully raising the curtain on a new century?

The trial into the events leading up to the 2023 Tempe rail tragedy is slated to begin on Monday in the central Greek city of Larissa – and the omens are not good. Among the 36 defendants that will be taking the stand are executives of the Greek railway company, the maintenance firm and the operator – OSE, ERGOSE and Hellenic Train, respectively – along with the stationmaster who was on duty that night and two colleagues who were not at their posts as they should have been.

The legendary incident with famous Greek composer Manos Hadjidakis is mentioned by singer-songwriter Dionysis Savvopoulos in his autobiography: In 1979, Hadjidakis, as director of the acclaimed Third Program – the public radio station of Greece's state broadcaster ERT, which mainly broadcasts classical music and culture – is playing Savvopoulos' new 15-minute song titled “A Long Zeibekiko for Nikos,” which had been censored, every day. The phones at the radio station are ringing off the hook, with associates of the then minister Athanasios Tsaldaris asking the station to stop playing it. Hadjidakis is unmoved. Eventually, the minister himself calls. Hatzidakis listened to him “sullen, gloomy and without uttering a word.” At one point he asked the minister if he was finished. And when Tsaldaris said “Yes,” Hadjidakis responded: “Minister, you are an idiot!” And he just hung up the phone.

This happened in the news last week: Greece's farm subsidy scandal was pushed aside for a day to give way to the comments of the European Public Prosecutor who brought it to light. The spotlight focused exclusively on Laura Kovesi, who was at the center of the 11th Delphi Economic Forum. Does she have the right to speak or not? Her comment that OPEKEPE – the Greek state-run agency at the center of the scandal – “is an acronym for corruption, nepotism and clientelism” is, however, a bit jarring, even though she stressed that there is no “corruption-free country.”

There are simply too many incidents involving electric scooters to count – thankfully, not all of them fatal. What we do know is that in 2025 alone, 400 children and teenagers under the age of 16 were injured in such incidents. We also know that 17 accidents took place in the first two months of this year, which means almost one every three days. The recent death of a 13-year-old boy in Ilia in the Peloponnese, however, shocked the country and triggered reactions. And we don't know how many of the incidents recorded have resulted in serious injuries that required hospitalization and which may have left serious, perhaps even irreversible, damage.