Election campaign shatters institutional consensus over the Adamuz tragedy

After the Socialist ranks questioned the performance of the regional government’s emergency services, the president and candidate for re-election, Juanma Moreno, mentioned the accident in last Monday’s debate and directly blamed the Spanish Government for the state of the roads.

This move triggered a chain reaction from the Socialist party, which has gone on the offensive by casting doubt on the effectiveness of the regional emergency services.

Moreno defended his position by arguing that his party had been extremely cautious for over a hundred days, waiting for information that never arrived from Madrid, and that he had finally been forced to speak out.

According to Guardia Civil, deficiencies in the railway infrastructure had been detected 22 hours before the collision. With this information on the table, last Monday during the debate on regional television, the PP candidate questioned María Jesús Montero to demand information and accountability from the government.

Since there is no better defence than a good offence, the Socialists shifted the focus from the cause of the accident to the subsequent handling of the situation. To this end, they did not hesitate to call upon the mayor of Adamuz. Rafael Moreno Reyes burst onto the campaign scene on Tuesday to criticise an allegedly collapsed emergency response system run by the regional government.

According to the PSOE's current narrative, it took the organised health service nearly two hours to get the situation under control. The new take from Andalusian socialists is that, during that time, the injured were left to rely solely on the goodwill of local residents and the limited municipal resources.

This strategy seeks to hold Juanma Moreno’s health management directly responsible for the alleged initial lack of coordination at the scene of the tragedy, which fits into the running theme of Montero’s campaign: the regional president is dismantling public services.

Far from responding to him, Moreno sent a sympathetic message to the mayor. “I can imagine the pressure this gentleman must have been under from the Socialist Party, but I believe the Spanish government is wrong because we have been prudent,” he said before revealing that it was the victims who were calling for a more aggressive stance from the Andalusian government.

From the PP’s headquarters, these accusations have been described as a “desperate ploy”. The regional minister for health and emergencies and the PP’s candidate in Cádiz, Antonio Sanz, countered the criticism by producing records showing that 39 ambulances were in the area during the first forty minutes of the emergency.

The PP also recalled the official acknowledgement signed by the mayor of Adamuz himself in March, which praised the exemplary work of the healthcare workers. For the PP, the fact that the PSOE is changing its tune months later is solely in response to an order from the party leadership to undermine the regional government’s image of competence in the final stretch of the campaign.

In his usual tone, Minister Óscar Puente interrupted the debate to demand explanations regarding the 112 emergency service. The back-and-forth exchange of accusations has left the victims fed up. Mario Samper, spokesperson for those affected, described it as despicable that the families’ suffering is being used as political ammunition. Although the victims have asked from day one that their pain not be turned into a political weapon, the dynamics of the campaign have ignored this request.

At the institutional level, the confrontation has had an immediate impact on the Governing Council’s activities. On Tuesday, the Regional Government approved a decree-law providing financial and tax relief for the victims, a move which the PSOE has branded as an electoral ploy because it came just days before the vote. Whilst the PP insists that it is an act of justice in the face of the State’s inaction, the Socialists consider it an attempt to divert attention from the failures in the emergency response chain of command.

The version of events on 18 January has split into two opposing accounts. On the one hand, the PP emphasises that no one died at the scene once the emergency services arrived, defending the professionalism of the 130 medical staff deployed. On the other hand, the PSOE insists that at 8.33 pm, almost an hour after the accident, chaos reigned and the Alvia passengers were still left to fend for themselves.

Juanma Moreno justifies the end of political discretion by saying he feels compelled by the victims who asked him for the Andalusian Government to defend them against the State. The president maintains that if the accident had occurred under a PP government in Madrid, criticism from the left would have been fierce from the very first minute. His patience has run out in the face of the Ministry of Public Works’ lack of transparency regarding the state of the tracks in Córdoba.

The election campaign has ultimately destroyed any semblance of institutional unity in the face of this tragedy. What for a hundred days appeared to be a measured handling of a crisis of national proportions has turned into a war of accusations of negligence and cover-ups.

The involvement of socialist mayors from the region, backing the claim of a delayed health response, reinforces the PSOE’s line of attack. In response, the PP is relying on technical data from its emergency services to dismiss the accounts questioning the speed of the rescue operation as falsehoods .

With the elections just days away, the consensus on Adamuz is now a distant memory.