Trains: Pedro Sánchez's new weak point

MadridThe People's Party (PP) began the year pressuring Pedro Sánchez with allegations of corruption within the Socialist Party (PSOE) and with the situation in Venezuela. Less than two weeks into 2026, the PP had already demanded the Spanish president's appearance before Congress to address these two issues. The Standing Committee of the lower house will, in fact, vote on whether to approve these two requests next Wednesday, along with others concerning other members of the Spanish government related to the proposed new regional financing system and the housing crisis. However, the Adamuz (Córdoba) train disaster... which has left 45 deadThis adds to the ever-growing list of headaches for the Socialist leader and has overshadowed the other hot potatoes that have marked this chaotic start to the year and the legislature in general.

The Popular Party's spokesperson in Congress, Ester Muñoz, announced this Thursday that her top priority in scrutinizing the Spanish government has become the management of the high-speed rail network. Although the PP has not yet deployed –in the midst of official mourning in the State– all his artillery against Sánchez; in the last two days he has already begun to corner him with this new ammunition and has questioned whether the management of infrastructure by the Minister of Transport, Óscar Puente, has been correct. Without calling for his resignation at the moment, Muñoz emphasized that "he shouldn't have been a minister a long time ago" and pointed to Sánchez as "responsible" for having appointed him.

Sánchez defended himself early this morning from Brussels, stating that his government has been assuming full responsibility "from the very beginning" following the train accident in Adamuz: "We assume all of it, as we have been doing since the first moment of the tragedy," he said. "The damage is irreparable, but the victims will always have the government's support in whatever is necessary, and [...] we will respond as we have responded to any of the crises we have faced," he added. The Popular Party maintains that explanations must be given urgently and wants to force an extraordinary plenary session next week for Sánchez to appear. Muñoz announced that he will contact the other parliamentary groups to try to achieve this—an absolute majority is required—with an initiative that could, once again, fracture the majority that brought him to power. For now, this Friday Alberto Núñez Feijóo will chair a meeting of the monitoring team for what he calls the "railway crisis" and will then appear before the media on the first day after the official mourning period is lifted. The public alarm generated by the catastrophe on the Madrid-Andalusia line, aggravated by the two commuter rail accidents and the one in Cartagena (Murcia), has turned the issue into a way to further weaken Sánchez, and the People's Party (PP) doesn't intend to waste it. "[The concern about the state of the railway network] is nothing new. No matter how much they try to convince us that this happened by chance and that nobody can explain it, it's not true," Muñoz emphasized. The PP has argued that it has been asking for months about the "breakdowns, delays, and maintenance" of the railway network without having received any satisfactory response. A senator from the People's Party, in fact, shared on X a speech he gave during the question period on December 2nd, addressed to Puente, in which he denounced the state's "railway chaos" and declared: "I hope that, thanks to Sánchez and all of you, we don't have to lament any misfortune." "It was bound to happen," stated the Murcian parliamentarian Francisco Bernabé after what has transpired in recent days.

While in Genoa they are laying the groundwork for their attack without fully deploying it, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, as usual, hasn't held back and has gone further than the PP's national leadership in her particular battle against the Spanish government. According to the Madrid president, Sánchez has imposed "the code of silence" because "he knows that this time they have no one to blame." "They need to buy time to find scapegoats and create a diversion," she asserted yesterday morning in an interview on Onda Madrid. The PP leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, joined in later that evening, at a ceremony honoring Gregorio Ordóñez, a victim of ETA, albeit reluctantly. Without explicitly mentioning the railway crisis, Feijóo emphasized that "silence is never the answer" to a tragedy. Ayuso did point directly to "political responsibility" for the accident, citing an alleged policy of "disinvestment" in the state to comply with the "blackmail" of the Catalan independence movement. She also linked it to alleged corruption during José Luis Ábalos's tenure as Minister of Transport, echoing the extreme right.

Vox is going all out.

While the People's Party (PP) offered only a half-hearted opposition in the days following the tragedy, Vox didn't hesitate to go all out from the very beginning, demanding accountability the day after the accident, this past Monday. The tone of Santiago Abascal's party has been... in crescendo To the point that they have announced a lawsuit for manslaughter, among other crimes related to an alleged "lack of maintenance" of the infrastructure, against the current president of Adif, Marco de la Peña, and Isabel Pardo de Vera, who held the position between 2018 and 2021 and is already under investigation in the Ábalos case. "Corruption kills," the party leader emphasized yesterday in a press conference at an event in Aragon, where they are the only ones who have not suspended their pre-campaign due to the mourning and have been using the catastrophe for days. to boost their electoral prospects to the detriment of the PSOE.