1. The PB of the CC of the KKE salutes the more than one and a half million demonstrators, workers, employees, self-employed, small traders and craftsmen, farmers, youth, parents with their children, artists, intellectuals and many others, who flooded the squares all over the country and abroad on 28 February, two years after the crime of Tempe. The people have spoken and the government, the bourgeois state and their mouthpieces have finally kept silent. We especially salute those who took the step for the first time, went on strike and participated in the strike rallies. The qualitative and at the same time promising element of these great mobilizations is that they took the form of a nationwide mass general strike, as the workplaces came to a standstill, the shops, schools and universities were closed, the school and university students participated en masse in the rallies, following the decisions of the trade unions and other mass bodies of the popular movement and the youth, as well as the call of the relatives of the victims of Tempe.

2. The crime in Tempe, together with the blatant attempt of the New Democracy government to cover it up, moves, sensitizes and fills with anger broader forces of the people and the youth. However, the success of the trade unions’ strike, which was firmly supported by the forces of PAME, was neither given nor taken for granted. The struggle of the strike and of the strike rallies was waged against a multi-faceted attempt of undermining, which was attempted from the very first moment by the government, the media propaganda, the compromised trade union leaderships of the New Democracy, PASOK and SYRIZA in the General Confederation of Greek Workers (GSEE) and the Greek Civil Servants' Confederation (ADEDY), which, after failing to prevent the strike from taking place, put obstacles in the way of participation and tried to distort its content. Even the political forces that called for the rallies not only deleted the word “strike” from their call, but slandered this strike as “irrelevant”, “partisan” and contrary to the struggle for the vindication of the dead of Tempe.

Threats by the government, scaremongering about “destabilization”, intimidation by the employers in the workplaces and even dismissals, were accompanied by a parallel attempt to distort the message of this struggle and turn it into a utopian rehabilitation of the decayed institutions of the criminal bourgeois state. In all the days leading up to the strike, a fear-based propaganda was used and eventually the state resorted to violence and repression, using the well-known mechanisms that always try to disorientate and slander the movement.

These efforts, however, failed and the mass participation in the strike eventually became a prerequisite for mass participation in the rallies.

The workers’–people’s movement, the determined and organized people who fight for their rights, can cancel the anti-people plans, avoid traps and overcome obstacles. The opponents, however powerful they may appear, are not omnipotent.

3. The members and friends of the KKE and KNE fought with all their might for the success of this important struggle for the workers’ and people’s movement. In the coming period, we will continue and intensify our efforts to reveal the whole truth about the crime in Tempe, so that there will be no cover-up and the culprits will be brought to account, no matter how high-ranking they are, so that our people will never experience such a tragedy again. Already much of the data and findings of the investigation into the Tempe crime confirm the KKE’s assessments of the causes that led to it, especially the policies of the ND, PASOK and SYRIZA governments since 2009 in the railway sector, based on EU guidelines, including the segmentation of the railways to sell off its most profitable parts, the contracts for the safety of trains that were never carried out, the understaffing and the intensification of the work of its staff and the use of the railways for NATO needs with the transport of dangerous goods.

We will continue our efforts, activities and initiatives within the movement, the people and the youth against everything that undermines their future. But also within the parliament, using every opportunity offered by the current institutional framework, being aware that the institutions of the bourgeois state, the legal framework that the bourgeois governments formulate and strengthen, whose most blatant expression is the law on the criminal liability of ministers (i.e. a law that provides for special treatment of ministers by the justice system, in contrast to other citizens), are made to promote the cover-up of the crimes of the system.

4. The mobilization of the people and the youth is acting as a catalyst for the developments that have cornered and shaken the New Democracy government, not only in relation to the Tempe crime, but also on other fronts, in the many  incidents like Tempe that the people are experiencing in every aspect of their lives. It turns out is that the  workers, the people and the youth rising up over the Tempe issue is the tip of the iceberg of a wider indignation and discontent, fear and concern for the future, which is fuelled overall by the deadlocks of the capitalist system facing the workers and the people as a whole. It is about the intensification of exploitation, the attack on the income of the workers and people with high prices, low wages, taxes, the deplorable state of vital social services and infrastructures such as education, health, protection against natural phenomena and disasters, international developments and the involvement of our country in the war fronts. Always and everywhere, two irreconcilable interests collide: on the one hand, the drive for greater profitability of the business groups and, on the other, the needs of the workers and the people.

The essence of this real political and social dilemma of our time is captured in the slogan “their profits or our lives”.

5. The political developments can only be for the benefit of the people if the workers’ and people’s movement puts its stamp on them, multiplies the seedbeds of resistance, organizes and rallies forces everywhere; if a nationally coordinated, united movement develops, which formulates common positions and objectives of struggle in an anti-capitalist and anti-monopoly direction and challenges the power of capital.

The solution today is not to use political developments as a "pressure valve" to diffuse the people’s indignation by pinning their hopes on a change of government or a change of the prime minister, so that the same criminal policy can continue unhindered with another government or other elected officials. These are old formulas with familiar results. The solution is not to try to restore the decayed and corrupt political system in order to achieve the infamous “stability”, “normality” and “social peace” that the other parties are striving for, which always means silencing the demands of the people.

The course of international and internal developments proves that stability for the system, especially in the current conditions of fierce competition, the redivision of the world and military involvement, means new, much greater sacrifices for the peoples. Many "crutches" are needed to play the game of political stability. They need both the liberal version of the New Democracy and the supposedly “progressive” – social-democratic version of PASOK, SYRIZA, etc., which today is limping along, because it is identified with the anti-people policies implemented by these forces when they were in government and tried to deceive the people. They also need the supposedly “anti-systemic” version of populism and deception, with the well-known formula —applied in Greece and abroad— of “disposable” personality-cult parties that invoke “social pathologies” in order to leave the system untouched.

6. The solution lies in consolidating the people's distrust of the government, the bourgeois state, the policies they implement, the strategic choices they make on behalf of the ruling class. In strengthening the doubt against everything that is and essentially constitutes the system. Because the system is the economy based on exploitative relations of production, and both its crises and its growth are always paid for by the working, popular majority. The system is the business groups that seek  maximum profit in every way. The system is the current bourgeois state with its decayed institutions and mechanisms, which can never be “rehabilitated”, which can never serve the just cause of the people. The system is the parties of capital and the EU that have ruled and are ruling this country.

This distrust can become a decision for an organized, unyielding struggle and rallying of forces with the KKE, with its revolutionary ideas and programme, for a different organization of the economy and society, where our lives will not be considered as a cost, for socialism.

All the people who do not compromise with the barbarity and the suffocation caused by the crimes of this system, can walk down the path of dignity, of struggle, of overthrowing this system. This is where true vindication and hope lie!

ATHENS, 1 MARCH 2025

THE PB OF THE CC OF THE KKE