End of political journey. Yesterday, Óscar Puente closed his appearance before the permanent deputation of Congress by surprise announcing his resignation as Minister of Transportation. He did so after spending more than four hours defending his management. There were 240 minutes of data, graphs and technical explanations with which he tried to disassociate himself from any direct responsibility for the Urda tragedy. He defended that the Madrid-Seville high-speed line is not abandoned and rejected having made or omitted decisions that contributed to the accident, but he was unable to change the climate of a stormy session in which almost all groups demanded his resignation.
The minister assured that he had made the decision since he became aware of the magnitude of the accident, which leaves a provisional balance of 69 dead and nearly 200 injured, 40 of them still hospitalized. However, he decided to wait to learn about the first investigations, and to inform the Cortes, before making his resignation public.
Puente informed Pedro Sánchez that he was going to announce his departure, via WhatsApp, just “a few minutes before” making it public in Congress, as he himself acknowledged. The President of the Government will now appoint his replacement to head Transport. And the Pucelana minister Ana Redondo, responsible for Equality, who until now occupied second place on the PSOE list for Congress for Valladolid, will replace him as head of the poster.
Sánchez thus loses one of his main political shields in the Executive, but also one of the most combative strikers of the PSOE in the run-up to the polls.
The unexpected announcement of Puente's resignation, after having appeared in the morning at the Moncloa after the Council of Ministers that approved aid for the victims of the accident and measures to reinforce safety on high speeds, and in the afternoon at the permanent deputation of Congress, was an absolute surprise even among Sánchez's hard core. In the Moncloa they defended, just a few hours before, that “the minister is not going to resign, nor are we going to fire him.”
Puente himself admitted last Friday that on the same day of the Urda accident he put his position at Sánchez's disposal. But the President of the Government rejected it and assured that it would be an “injustice” to dismiss him. And, for six days, the minister chose to endure all the pressure and delay an exit that even PSOE leaders considered inevitable from the first moment of the Urda tragedy, at the gates of the 29-N electoral campaign.
Sánchez said goodbye to his until now faithful squire last night: "He has shown his face, he has given solutions and, later, he has stepped aside. Out of dignity, out of his own free will, out of respect for the victims and the progressive project." The president contrasted his decision with the attitude of the PP: "Politicians like him dignify our country and show us that we are not all the same. While some only give lessons, others give everything." La Moncloa reported that until his dismissal is effective, Puente remains head of Transportation.
The resignation does not close, however, the open political crisis. The PP was quick to censure that Puente's departure could be presented as a gesture of dignity or political responsibility and interpreted it, on the contrary, as an acknowledgment of guilt that should also reach the President of the Government. “Puente's resignation is a confession of guilt on the part of him and, above all, of the person who appointed him and allowed him to continue in his position,” said the PP deputy secretary of the Treasury, Juan Bravo.
"It is not an act of dignity. Don't dare to sell it as such," he added, before summing up his assessment with one sentence: "It is a resignation that comes 116 lives too late."
The formation of Alberto Núñez Feijóo thus transferred the focus of the crisis to the head of the Executive. The parliamentary spokesperson, Ester Muñoz, had already warned that Puente's departure did not solve the problem because "the person responsible for our railway system having been in the hands of Ábalos and Puente remains in his position."
Vox joined the demand for Sánchez's resignation. Santiago Abascal accused the president of hiding behind his collaborators and maintained that the ultimate responsibility was his. He even described him as a “mafia boss” and demanded that he be brought “to justice.”
The pressure on Puente had not come only from the opposition. Sumar and the PNV also demanded his resignation during the appearance, although they distanced themselves from the attribution of responsibilities for the accident. Sumar's spokesperson, Verónica Martínez Barbero, insisted that she did not attribute blame for the tragedy to him, but rather the political responsibility derived from his position. “You are in charge of the ministry on which our railway system depends and you must also respond from that position,” he argued. The PNV spokesman, Mikel Legarda, warned him that he should not cling to the president's trust: "He has lost that of the citizens and there is no remedy for that."
ERC and EH Bildu maintained a different position, although they did not offer political support to the minister either. Gabriel Rufián acknowledged that Puente is “a good politician and shows his face,” but considered that his appearance was “a distraction.” The ERC spokesperson focused on the railway model and warned that “a human error reflects a failed safety system.” Mertxe Aizpurua, from EH Bildu, refused to reduce the tragedy to an individual failure and asked to wait for the result of the investigation before pointing fingers at the workers.
Faced with criticism, the federal leadership of the PSOE closed ranks with who until yesterday was one of its members. In the internal chat of the socialist leadership, there were messages of recognition of Puente's decision, to whom his colleagues attributed "dignity" and "courage." Some conveyed the “pride” that their behavior produced in them and highlighted the work done during their time at the head of the ministry.
Ada Colau, Frente Amplio candidate and one of the voices that had demanded his departure, thanked him for “the dignity of this difficult gesture.”
In his farewell, Puente wanted to give his decision a political dimension and appealed to the precedent of Portuguese Minister Jorge Coelho, who resigned in 2001 after the collapse of a bridge in which 59 people died. “He then used a phrase that I want to make mine: guilt cannot die single,” he said. He defended that his resignation was “a decision of political dignity” and that his purpose was to contribute to returning that dignity to politics.
