Spain votes in a snap election on November 29, and as of Wednesday the campaign is about trains. The collision of two high speed trains in Toledo province killed 68 people and was the second deadly crash on the same line in nine months. The Guardian reported on Friday that the disaster has redrawn the battle lines of the election, shifting the contest from the housing crisis, where Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez had been gaining, onto the state of the infrastructure his government runs.
Sanchez called the snap election on October 5 in the aftermath of protests over the death of Maricarmen Abascal, an octogenarian evicted from her home of more than 70 years, which put housing, the top concern in Spanish polling, at the centre of politics. A state pollster CIS survey in October put his Socialists ahead. At the crash site on Wednesday, Sanchez called the accident a terrible tragedy, promised a full investigation and pledged to address any failures it finds. Transport Minister Oscar Puente rejected claims that the rail system is dangerous, calling it reliable and safe within the limits of the material and of human action.
The opposition split its response by audience. People’s Party leader Alberto Nunez Feijoo first urged prudence and respect, then demanded an immediate government and judicial investigation and promised a full review of the network if he wins power, saying pain does not oblige anyone to keep quiet. Vox leader Santiago Abascal attacked directly, telling a rally that the government has destroyed everything including infrastructure, while hundreds of mostly far right demonstrators gathered at the Transport Ministry on Wednesday evening calling for Sanchez’s resignation.
The political exposure is specific. Spain’s 4,000 kilometre high speed network is the world’s second largest after China’s, and Sanchez once campaigned on it as proof of a modernising state. Two fatal crashes in a year, on the same line, convert that asset into the opposition’s exhibit on underinvestment after years of rapid network expansion, an accusation experts and the public are now making alongside the parties, Reuters reported. The cause of Wednesday’s crash has not been determined, and no finding yet assigns responsibility to maintenance or investment decisions; the election argument is running ahead of the technical one.
That gap is the campaign’s central fact for the next month. If investigators publish interim findings before November 29, they will land in the middle of voting; if they do not, Spaniards will vote with the argument unresolved, on trust in the government’s account of its own railway.