The wildfires of recent days have left behind dead and scorched earth. Among the victims are firefighters and aerial firefighting pilots who fell in the line of duty. No political statement, no debate comes before this tragic loss. The least we owe these people is to talk about the problem honestly and without petty politics.
And the problem has a name. The climate crisis has changed the nature of fire. Droughts last longer. Temperatures break one record after another. Vegetation turns into fuel from June onwards. This is not happening only in our country. Spain, Portugal, France, and even countries in Central Europe that had never had such an experience, now live through summers with wildfires of enormous proportions. Fire has become a European problem.
That is why the European Union is now building a common fleet of aerial means and common assistance mechanisms. No country can withstand this battle alone. Anyone who insists on discussing it as an exclusively Greek government failure simply refuses to see what is happening around us. And denying reality in politics is an unforgivable mistake.
In recent years, Greece has taken steps that few countries have taken. It created a Ministry for Climate Crisis and Civil Protection, giving a single institutional centre to a battle that was previously divided among many offices. It launched the largest renewal of civil protection equipment ever carried out in the country, with new firefighting aircraft, vehicles and equipment for ground forces.
It organised preventive forest clearing on an unprecedented scale. It established 112 and the doctrine of early evacuation and protection of human life, which in these days alone moved thousands of citizens and visitors out of the path of the fire. And it made Greece a European base hosting forces from other countries every summer. The results can be seen in the data, not in impressions.
In the last 24 hours, dozens of rural and forest fires broke out, and the overwhelming majority of them were extinguished at their initial stage. In this difficult battle, one of the tools that make a difference is drones. They monitor high-risk areas and detect hotspots before they grow, giving ground forces a real-time picture. A fire detected within the first ten minutes is put out with a single water tender.
The same fire, an hour later, needs aircraft. Drones do not replace the firefighter in the field. But they multiply the value of every person and every asset. That is why their use must be expanded, with a denser surveillance network in the regions, with thermal cameras for the night and with systematic use in detecting flare-ups.
Protecting human life is the first measure of success of any civil protection policy. On this front, the country is moving forward, with a plan and with institutions created to last. The work is not over, and no one claims it is. The opposition has every right to criticise. But it must also answer a simple question: what is its own proposal for the next fire season? Specifically — not hot air. Because denunciations over the ashes have never protected a single forest or anyone’s property.
They have gone as far as blaming us for the delay in the delivery of the Canadair aircraft by the Canadian company — as if we ought to, or could, send ministers to assemble the planes faster! We have no obligation to answer that kind of criticism. We leave it to public ridicule. Our responsibility is to keep working. And that is exactly what we will do.
