Urda train crash with 68 deaths shakes Spain's election campaign

A train crash in Urda, Toledo, has killed 68 people and injured more than seventy, according to Infolibre. The accident is Spain's second fatal rail disaster in less than ten months, following the Adamuz crash in Córdoba nine months earlier in which 46 people died.

Transport Minister Óscar Puente called the Urda tragedy inexplicable, while Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez described its repetition within the same year as unacceptable. Some PSOE leaders openly question Puente's continued role in the government less than a month before the elections.

“This changes everything.”

The government has decreed three days of official mourning, and the PSOE has suspended its precampaign activities at least until Sunday. Socialist sources say they still do not know how to resume their electoral strategy.

Until now, the PSOE had regained political initiative by focusing on love and hope as an alternative to what it calls the obscurantism of the PP and Vox. The party had also used issues such as housing and pension errors by opposition leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo to set the political agenda.

Sánchez said all necessary measures will be taken with total firmness to restore confidence in the system. Government sources in Moncloa have issued no public signal, though officials acknowledge the tragedy has left Sánchez very shaken.

Puente, described as Sánchez's loyal ally, has served both as a defensive shield on difficult issues and as an offensive voice on topics where other ministers stay behind. His acidic and sometimes offensive style is used from Moncloa to deliver rhetoric that cannot come from official institutional discourse.