Spain Train Disaster Casts Shadow Over Sánchez's Bid for Re-election Weeks Before Snap Vote

Nine months after two trains collided near Cordoba and killed 46 people, Spain is counting the dead from another crash on the high-speed line south from Madrid. This time the collision was in central Spain, near Toledo. So far 69 bodies have been recovered from wreckage strewn across the tracks and down an embankment.

For the families, it is a private catastrophe. It is also a national one, shaking confidence in the country's rail network and in the Socialist-led government of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, and it has arrived only weeks before the snap general election he called.

The formal investigation has only just begun, but the government moved quickly to set the narrative. From the first hours, Transport Minister Oscar Puente suggested human error was to blame, keeping responsibility as far from the cabinet as he could. On Friday he faced the press for a second time to lay out what he called the objective facts and to answer a surge of criticism. The opposition People's Party is among those calling on him to resign, describing it as a moral and ethical step.

Puente expressed huge pain and sadness for the victims, then went on the offensive. He rejected claims of chronic underinvestment and said the LZB signalling safety system used on Spain's high-speed lines is neither old nor inadequate, noting that Germany and Austria use the same one. In Spain it has already failed 170 times this year, he disclosed, which he called normal and about the EU average.

The problem, he argued, comes after a failure, when control of the line shifts to manual. Here he pointed to a chain of human errors. At one point a controller told a stalled train to restart, clearing it to move at up to 160km/h even though a second train was stuck on the line ahead. The looming collision could be heard in audio calls and seen on big screens in the control centre in Madrid. "They worked. We checked. They could see what was happening," Puente said. Yet the advancing train was never ordered to stop. "I'm no judge," he added, "but these are the facts."

Asked whether he would take personal and political responsibility and step down, he said it was his duty to stay. He promised to face things, explain, and work out how to improve the system and restore confidence among those who want to travel by train.

Spaniards may take persuading. Paco Camas of the pollster Ipsos notes that this is not just a very serious accident but the second in a short time. The investigation into January's crash at Adamuz, near Cordoba, remains open, with early reports pointing to a crack in the rails, a very different cause. The effect on public trust, Camas says, is similar: it damages faith in the railways and in institutions generally, and in Spain people blame their government when such things happen.

For Sánchez's team this is the latest in a run of troubles. Allegations of corruption against his close relatives persist, and are denied. A sudden influx of migrants from Morocco into the exclave of Ceuta this summer led right-wing opponents to charge incompetence and underfunding. Then a viral video of a pensioner being forcibly evicted from her home set off street protests, after which Sánchez called the early vote.

His chances looked slim before the crash and have now plummeted. Recent polls had the centre-right PP finishing first and forming a coalition with the far-right Vox. Prof Pablo Simon of Madrid's Carlos III University says that majority appears in almost 95% of his simulations. Sánchez had been running a positive campaign to draw apathetic voters to the polls; Simon says the Socialists have now totally lost control of the agenda and the emotion of the campaign, amid a mood of decay and depression.

There is anger too. Far-right groups have led small protests in Madrid over the crash, and large numbers of police are on stand-by this weekend for possible clashes organised online. In Toledo, the mood is nervous. Paloma, arriving at the station on a half-empty train, said everyone travelled in silence and sadness. She is now scared of the high-speed network and angry at the government, and says the crash will change everyone's vote, from left to right. Lucia, who commutes daily to Madrid on the AVE, is frightened too. With more than 100 dead in two accidents, she says, things must change.

The investigation and the pressure on Puente will now run alongside the final weeks of the campaign.