At 9:08 on Wednesday, 15 minutes after the collision of two trains in the province of Toledo that has caused at least 69 fatalities, Óscar Puente retweeted a message with a video of the now re-elected Brazilian president, Lula da Silva, when he surrendered to the Police in 2018 to serve his prison sentence for corruption, comparing it to the reaction of Flávio Bolsonaro, his rival in Sunday's elections, who fled to the US after the defeat while being investigated for alleged illegal financing. "The moral superiority of the left," proclaimed the Minister of Transport in his X account, while addressing the inauguration of the World Infrastructure Forum.
Upon his arrival at the campus of the Polytechnic University of Madrid, the place where the event was being held, the former socialist leader received the news of the second railway tragedy that occurred in just nine months after the collision in Adamuz (Córdoba), last January, also due to the collision of an AVE and an Iryo, in which another 46 people lost their lives. From there he went directly to the Atocha station and, after meeting with the Adif technicians, he appeared before the media with a serious expression to point out a human error in the "unbelievable" and "inexplicable" accident in Urda and to rule out that he was considering resignation, arguing that he is "clarifying and trying to resolve this" and not thinking about it.
Puente, on the other hand, looked very smiling just a week before the new fatal accident on the line that connects the Spanish capital with Seville, in an interview on the program Face to the show, with presenter Marc Giró, where he spoke in a relaxed tone about personal aspects - among them his hyperactivity in X -, politics and his management at the head of the Transport portfolio. In the promotional sketch for his intervention in La Sexta, a voice-over was heard warning that, "due to a system breakdown", the elevator in which the minister went up to the set would be "stopped for longer than usual", to which he responded in a joking tone: "My God, as if we didn't have enough with the Renfe already."
Since the call of the elections, on October 5, in addition to acting as de facto spokesperson for the PSOE on social networks, the highest institutional leader of railway infrastructure in Spain was working in tandem with Pedro Sánchez in the pre-campaign, a role that José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero played in 2023, now out of focus after his accusation for the rescue of the Plus Ultra airline and the scandal of the jewels hidden in a safe. On the same day of the announcement, he posted an almost eight-minute video to express his "reflections" on the appointment with the 29-N polls, which ranged from a closed defense of the Government of which he is a part - "avant-garde model and global progressivism" - to harsh criticism of a potential alliance of the PP and Vox, which he gave as an example of "hatred" and "mediocrity."
In these weeks Puente has attended three rallies with the president - in the one in Valladolid he gave his own 20-minute speech -, several informative meetings, such as the Nueva Economía Fórum breakfast on Monday and a colloquium at the Club Siglo XXI on Tuesday, in which a significant bulk of the questions revolved around politics, and he has given interviews to TVE and La Ser, in addition to La Sexta, without abandoning his role as commentator and scourge of the opposition in X. This Wednesday he planned to hold a meeting with socialist militants in Cádiz, which he suspended due to the accident.
After the Adamuz tragedy, even in the critical sector of the party with the ruling party that the Minister of Transport represents, they separated the "facet of a thug public figure" from his "profile of an effective manager, much more institutional", as he had demonstrated in crises like the Dana. Those days, however, he tried to discredit that the main hypothesis of the cause was the breakage of the track - advanced by EL MUNDO and later confirmed by the Railway Accident Investigation Commission -, ruling out that it was "a decisive indication."
Now, the former mayor of Valladolid, who together with Sánchez had been the most publicly enthusiastic in encouraging the spirit of the comeback on 29-N by appealing to the useful vote, will have to spend his time managing another catastrophe that compromises his immediate political future. Until late Wednesday, at least, he had only resumed using X to report his movements.
