"If because of poorly measured trains, senior officials of the Ministry of Transport are dismissed, applying the rule of three, shouldn't the authors of the botch of the law of only yes is yes resign?" Alberto Núñez Feijóo reproached Pedro Sánchez during the tense parliamentary duel that both fought yesterday in the Senate.
"Well, yes, we make mistakes," admitted the Prime Minister. "But we insist on solving those errors," he defended himself, in the face of criticism from the leader of the Popular Party.
Sánchez assumes that his Government, like any human being, is also wrong. But he highlights, to give it political value, that when mistakes occur in the Executive's action, he strives to correct and compensate them. Not like others, he failed to say.
Although in Moncloa they consider the level of "demand and assumption of responsibilities" of the current head of the Executive compared to his predecessors of the PP, Mariano Rajoy and José María Aznar, "incomparable". "No one in the PP has ever resigned, for nothing, no matter how serious it was," they emphasize in Moncloa.
In recent weeks, Sánchez has admitted at least two serious errors by his government. And although his intention to correct these fiascoes suffered delays, even months while possible alternatives were explored –always under great internal and external pressure–, they finally occurred.
The first was due to the undesired effects of the application of the “only yes is yes” law, which caused an escalation in sentence reductions and releases of rapists and sexual offenders. Faced with the impossibility of sealing an agreement within the coalition between the PSOE and Unidas Podemos, Sánchez chose to act alone with the bill registered by the Socialists to try to correct in the future the perverse consequences of the new norm, which now It is in the parliamentary process.
The second mistake made by the Government in recent weeks is that of the trains designed for Cantabria and Asturias, which are larger than the tunnels through which they had to run.
In this case, in addition to the economic compensation agreed for both territories and the users of these railway services, technical and political responsibilities were purged with up to four relays, among the strong pressure exerted by the two affected regional presidents, the Cantabrian Miguel Ángel Revilla and the Asturian Adrián Barbón, who on May 28 is also running for re-election at his appointment with the polls.
A couple of weeks ago, two technical managers from Renfe and Adif were fired for this fiasco. And last Monday both the Secretary of State for Transport, Isabel Pardo de Vera, and the president of Renfe, Isaías Táboas, resigned. "It is time to assume responsibilities, because it is inherent to our positions," justified the Minister of Transportation, Raquel Sánchez.
The government spokesperson, Isabel Rodríguez, defended yesterday that the assumption of responsibilities is accompanied by proposed solutions to "the error produced". "I would have liked those responsible at other times in history and from other political parties to have given the explanations from the first moment that the Minister of Transport has offered," said the spokesperson for the Executive.
In Moncloa, in any case, they contrast these resignations with the "zero assumption of political responsibilities" by the PP governments, in the face of other errors that also caused serious tragedies during the terms of Aznar and Rajoy.
And they cite from the Angrois railway accident in 2013, with 80 deaths, to the Yak-42 accident in Turkey in 2003, with 75 deaths on the return flight from Afghanistan, or the accident in the Valencia Metro, in the 2006, which caused the death of 43 people. In none of these tragedies, they warn, the competent administrations of the PP assumed any political responsibility.
