Oscar Lightning Puente

There was expectation for Óscar Puente's appearance, to see if his resignation would occur, and the newspapers that wanted to see this fuse blow were trying to exert pressure from their front pages, while those closest to the PSOE continued to deepen the line of human error. "The Atocha controllers confused the protocol," they wrote in El País. On the other hand, in Abc the headline was: "Puente fired technicians and filled Adif's leadership with politicians". They accompanied it with a second news item: "Sánchez sidelines the minister he used as a battering ram", and then said that "he was not considering dismissing him so that the wear and tear would be focused on him, 'very affected emotionally'", with the use of cowardly quotation marks, which avoid indicating who is making that quote assessing the socialist's intimate state. The right-wing newspapers know that Puente, who had been mentioned as a successor to Sánchez, is now only a shadow: the lightning rod that, precariously, prevents electricity from being transmitted to the Spanish president. In fact, in the editorial that Abc published on Friday (therefore, before the appearance), they were not satisfied with the hypothetical resignation of Puente: "Responsibility cannot stop at an inept minister. It also reaches the president who appointed him, kept him in office and supported his management". In any case, the triple media right does not agree, because while here they suggest that he would like to leave and they won't let him, in El Mundo the headline suggested the opposite and a desire to cling to the armchair: "Puente's continuity divides the PSOE, while he buys time".

There are still a few weeks left until the elections, but it is possible that the discussion about the accident will dominate the bulk of the campaign conversation and completely displace the programs and proposals. It is an emotional and polarizing matter. No matter how much they perform the pertinent gestures of mourning, it is much more attractive to them, in this era of spectacle politics, than to start talking about trifles like, bah, housing.