Óscar Puente announced his resignation as Minister of Transport and Sustainable Mobility of Spain on Tuesday, six days after the railway accident in Urda (Toledo) that resulted in 69 fatalities and became the second major disaster of Spanish high-speed rail in less than a year.
The announcement came at the end of a self-requested appearance before the Permanent Deputation of the Congress, where Puente also declined to lead the PSOE list for Valladolid in the general elections on November 29, less than a month before the elections.
The shift was notable because just three days earlier, on October 30, the minister had publicly ruled out resigning from his position and had pointed to a possible human error at the Regulation and Control Center of Adif as the main hypothesis for the incident, which the opposition interpreted as an attempt to shift the blame onto a low-level worker to secure his political continuity.
Puente justified his departure as a matter of "political dignity, coherence, and empathy with the victims," and he was unequivocal: "A Minister of Transport cannot continue in office after two accidents of this severity in less than a year."
The Urda accident occurred on October 28 when a Renfe AVE train with 397 passengers rear-ended an Iryo train with 147 travelers that was stopped on the tracks. The collision derailed four carriages, two of which fell down an embankment.
The investigation focuses on three successive security failures: a malfunction of the LZB signaling system that affected 63 kilometers of track, an order from the control center operator to the AVE to resume operations "normally" without imposing the 40 km/h limitation required in degraded mode, and the absence of any alert to the AVE driver regarding the train stopped ahead.
The contract to replace that obsolete system with the modern ERTMS was awarded in 2021 for €93.8 million, with a deadline until January 2026, but the upgrade was not operational when the incident occurred.
This accident was the second on the Spanish high-speed network in less than a year. The previous one occurred on January 18 in Adamuz (Córdoba), where an Iryo train derailed and encroached on the opposite track after colliding with an Alvia, resulting in 46 deaths. The combined toll of both incidents exceeds 115 fatalities.
Before Congress, Puente acknowledged that "the blame cannot remain unaccounted for" and asserted that his pain, while incomparable to that of the families, was the greatest after that of the victims: "The tragedy, without a doubt, belongs to the victims, their families, their loved ones, whom they will never be able to see again."
The reaction from the opposition was immediate and harsh. The spokesperson for the PP in Congress, Ester Muñoz, asserted that the resignation came “116 dead too late,” while the party's secretary general, Miguel Tellado, described it as “necessary, but not enough,” extending the responsibility to President Pedro Sánchez. From Vox, Santiago Abascal directly demanded the resignation of the head of the government.
The federal leadership of the PSOE described Puente's decision as a gesture of "dignity" and "courage." Sánchez will need to appoint a new Minister of Transport amid an ongoing judicial and technical investigation into the two accidents, with general elections less than four weeks away.
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