The Tempi railway accident that happened on the night of the 28th of February 2023 shuttered the Greek public opinion. The accident would dominate the political, media and public agenda for at least two years after. This paper examines the crisis communication and blame management by the government during two different time periods. The first period contains the days after the accident and the second, the parliamentary discussions during the vote for no confidence one year later, in March 2024. The aim is to explore the rhetorical – communicational strategies used to manage the severity of the event and the image of the government.
The research focuses on the two main political figures, the Prime Minister of Greece, Kyriakos Mitsotakis and the then Minister of Infrastructure and Transport Kostas Karamanlis. The paper uses a mixed-methods approach. A discourse analysis is applied for identifying the strategies used. Then, it continues with a quantification of the qualitative results to get an overview of the frequency of the strategies used. Both analyses have been conducted with the help of MAXQDA. The study is grounded on the crisis communication theories of Apology (Image Restoration and Real Apology) and Blame management.
The findings reveal how crisis communication strategies were deployed and their subsequent impact in the process of the Tempi train accident crisis management and political management level. The findings suggest that the initial causal attribution for the train accident was the “tragic human error” by the stationmaster. This evolved later into framing the crisis as an “endemic system failure”, which combined with the use of corrective action and transcendence, aimed to shift the blame away from the government and align the narrative with the broader political agenda of state modernization. However, this led the situation to be framed as scandal.
The paper contributes to the existing literature on blame management and crisis communication showing that mismanagement can lead easily to secondary crisis and to politicization of the issue. The paper examines a case study of high visibility in Greece that has become a constant issue of debate in the last couple of years.
