Train drivers' strikes and apolitical demonstrations

The chaos at Renfe and Adif affects commuter rail, medium-distance trains, and increasingly, high-speed rail. This is the result of a political decision enthusiastically embraced by both the PP and the PSOE: everything on the AVE high-speed rail, and that all AVE services be for travel to and from Madrid. Thirty-four years after the first line, Madrid-Seville, they still haven't managed to connect Barcelona and Valencia.

Spain's AVE frenzy (the country with the second-largest network in the world, after China) continues: Adif and Adif Alta Velocidad have received over €4.3 billion from the European Commission's Next Generation fund (to give you an idea, Seat received €76 million) for infrastructure, and only 16% for maintenance. The result is that commuter rail has to operate like buses and high-speed trains have to run at half speed.

This is bad governance. That's why it's impossible to hold an "apolitical" demonstration against the railway chaos. And now the train drivers say they want "structural reform and more safety," but when they had the chance to achieve it by transferring control to the Generalitat (a transfer that could only lead to improvement, as seen in the comparison with the Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat, and because things could only get worse), they refused. And the situation isn't going to change quickly, because more than 80% of the thousand train drivers are from outside Catalonia. We have the poor service that the State wanted us to have. And now the train drivers and passengers are also suffering from a high-speed service that neither France nor Germany can afford. It's all politics, and as Fuster said, the politics of the trains has been orchestrated against us.