“Technical factors” will decide when the project – contemplated in the Master Plan designed by AENA – to build a second runway at the Alicante-Elche-Miguel Hernández airport, as well as the expansion of Valencia-Manises, receives the green light. That is the official response of the central government to the claim reiterated this week with emphasis by Carlos Mazón who champions the tourist vocation of the Valencian Community.
ADIF’s technical planning is also the argument used by the Ministry of Transport to justify the need to electrify as soon as possible the roads that run along the coast to the south of the city of Alicante. The development of the Mediterranean Corridor is at stake, they say, but residents and political forces of Alicante agree that this desirable and expensive improvement will delay a demand that the city has been requesting for decades: the removal of those roads that act as a wall between the city. and the coast Yesterday there was a protest in front of the Government subdelegation.
As if that were not enough, yesterday it was also known that the works at the Madrid Chamartín station, with which trains to and from Alicante now connect instead of with Atocha, will require the suppression of some frequencies, four daily, apparently.
More fuel for a political dispute that the Consell fuels from the perspective of comparative grievance – “Málaga received its second runway with fewer travelers than Alicante has today,” Mazón said on Thursday – and has converted the Government Delegate, Pilar Bernabé , in a kind of deputy spokesperson for the Minister of Transport, who responds to each demand with the expression of the “firm will” of the Sánchez Government to address those and all those that arise from the Valencian Community.
And it’s not that Minister Puente needs them to speak on his behalf; He had barely inaugurated his ministerial portfolio when with a stroke of his pen he resolved all doubts about government support for an expansion of the Port of Valencia to which the other partner of the Executive was frontally opposed.
The curious thing is that, as in that matter, it could end up that the agreement between PSOE and PP, apparently irreconcilable enemies, was greater than that between the socialists and some of their parliamentary partners.
In fact, in the case of the second runway of the Alicante airport, the reports prepared by the Botànic already invite us to think that the environmental issue – its impact on the Aguamarga salt flat – and the suspicion that tourism development arouses on the left of the PSOE , will place EU-Podem-Sumar (or whatever results from them) and Compromís in opposition to an expansion that the Ministry would carry out tomorrow if it had the resources for it.
In any case, legislatures fly by, and the administrative complexity and high cost of transportation infrastructure do not facilitate prompt satisfaction of the demands at stake. The belligerence in this regard from a business community very chastened by the disappointing state investment figures in Alicante in recent years, guarantees that the debate on transport infrastructure – as is the case with the recurring water battle – will be a key factor in politics. Valencia in the years to come.
