Spain train disaster clouds Sánchez chances of re-election

At least 69 bodies have been recovered from the wreckage of a high-speed train collision south of Madrid, just weeks before a snap general election. The crash on a line from the Spanish capital comes nine months after another rail disaster near Cordoba killed 46 people. Transport Minister Oscar Puente said from the first hours that “human error” was likely to blame.

Puente has faced calls to resign from the opposition People’s Party, but he rejected that idea and said it was his “duty” to remain. He expressed “huge pain and sadness” for the victims, then went on the offensive against criticism. He dismissed talk of chronic underinvestment in infrastructure, saying Spain’s LZB signalling system is neither old nor inadequate, and that Germany and Austria use the same.

Yet the problem surrounds what happens when the system fails and control shifts to manual. LZB has failed 170 times so far this year in Spain; Puente called that “normal” and around the EU average. In the latest accident, a controller instructed a stalled train to restart, clearing it to advance at up to 160km/h (100 mph) even though a second train was stuck on the line ahead. Audio calls and big screens in the control centre showed the impending collision. “They worked. We checked. They could see what was happening,” Puente said. The advancing train was never ordered to stop.

Political fallout

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called the snap election, and his chances already looked slim before the crash. Most recent polls showed the centre-right PP first, forming a coalition with far-right Vox. Professor Pablo Simon of Madrid’s Carlos III University said: “They have this majority in almost 95% of the simulations we have done.” Sánchez had been running a positive campaign to lure apathetic voters, but the agenda and emotion are now lost, Simon said. The general mood is one of decay, that the country is not working properly, and depression.

Pollster Paco Camas of Ipsos said the accident “destroys people’s confidence not only in the railways but institutions in general,” and that in Spain people blame their government when such things happen. Allegations of corruption against the PM’s close relatives persist, all denied. A sudden influx of migrants from Morocco to the Spanish exclave of Ceuta this summer prompted right-wing opponents to shout incompetence and underfunding. A video of a pensioner forcibly evicted from her home went viral and sparked street protests.

Small protests over the train crash have been led by far-right groups in Madrid, with large numbers of police on stand-by this weekend ahead of further potential clashes organised online. A passenger named Paloma, arriving at a city station on a half-empty train, said she travelled in silence and felt really sad, scared of the high-speed network and angry at the government. “This crash will change all of our votes, completely,” she said. “We’ll shift from the left wing to the right. Because of everything that’s happened.” Another commuter, Lucia, who takes the high-speed AVE into Madrid each day, said she is scared too. She blamed human error, noted two accidents with more than 100 dead, and said things are really bad and have to change.