In Spain it is so rare that there are resignations of high-ranking Administration officials that when they occur they cause us perplexity. The normal thing is that they take advantage of the cyclical government crises to clean up the most responsible positions in the ministries and thus the falls from grace go more unnoticed. There are countries, such as the United Kingdom, where ministers are resigning one after another due to events that here would hardly deserve a disapproval in the Congress of Deputies. The level of demand has always been much more lax in our latitudes.
For this reason, when the tragic error of designing trains that did not fit in tunnels in the communities of Asturias and Cantabria was discovered, we all believed that with the resignations of a senior officer from Adif and another from Renfe, registered a few days ago, the issue it had ended. But lo and behold, Spain celebrates regional and municipal elections in May, and the scandal that had arisen in these communities was so great that the Asturian and Cantabrian presidents wanted more blood. They weren’t worth that of the senior officials who had been suspended from their functions and it was necessary to look for more weighty culprits. This is how the resignation yesterday of the Secretary of State for Transport, Mobility and the Urban Agenda, Isabel Pardo de Vera, and the president of Renfe, Isaías Táboas, is understood. All the sources known to the person signing this article – and not all are of the same political color – agree that both are two of the best managers the current socialist government had. And we know that the Minister of Transport, Raquel Sánchez, has a very good opinion of both, despite the fact that there were some discrepancies between them, as Fernando H. Valls explains today in our newspaper.
Therefore, in the end what matters is the impact of this crisis three months before the elections. If this had happened at another time away from the polls, I am afraid I am not mistaken in writing that today Pardo de Vera and Táboas would continue in their posts. Both have been run over by a train, which is none other than the electoral one.
