MADRID, Spain – Transport Minister Óscar Puente announced his resignation on Tuesday, almost a week after the Urda rail accident, at the end of his appearance before the Permanent Deputation of Congress, also renouncing his seat as a PSOE deputy after the 29 November elections, in which he is running as number one for Valladolid.
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“The decision about my future I made in the first minutes after the tragedy, as I was heading to Adif’s control centre, and I let my family know,” Puente explained at the end of a Permanent Deputation session lasting more than four hours, which he concluded by referring “exclusively” to political responsibility, “mine,” he specified before surprising everyone by announcing his resignation as transport minister and as PSOE candidate for Valladolid in the upcoming elections. “A transport minister of a country like Spain cannot remain in his post with two accidents of this severity in a year,” Puente said, growing more emotional as his speech went on.
“I am making this decision public in the place where it makes the most sense,” he said in reference to Congress and after the “most urgent and unpostponable work of the first inquiries” and to “adopt the first measures to compensate for and improve as far as possible rail safety in the short term,” which the Cabinet took on Tuesday.
After that same Cabinet meeting, Puente himself had not categorically ruled out his resignation, but neither had he given any sign of what he planned to do in Congress a few hours later, with Moncloa also conveying that the debate over his resignation was already closed and that he would not go because the “responsible thing is to be at the head” of the ministry, “recover confidence” and do “what is expected of leaders” at the head of institutions.
All this came after days in which both the opposition parties, PP and Vox, and the government’s parliamentary partners had demanded his resignation, and despite the fact that he himself has said he took the decision to resign “minutes” after the tragedy, that is, on 28 October. Puente thus waited to approve measures at the Cabinet meeting and to appear in Congress before resigning.
In his final address to the Permanent Deputation, Puente thanked those who have given him their “support” these days and assured that his decision to resign “is a necessary and positive measure,” saying resignation is a decision of political dignity and must be seen as such, proper to “a mature democracy, a strong and prosperous country, not a failed state as some insist.” In his thanks, Puente made special mention of his parents, wife and children and also his sister Sofía Puente, whom they are trying to make life impossible, as well as Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, whom he thanked for his “confidence.”
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“I know it will be a sad moment for him, one more on this path of light and shadows that is political life,” said Puente, who closed his speech with a message against “hopelessness.” As he later explained to journalists waiting outside the chamber, he conveyed his decision to resign to Sánchez only minutes before announcing it at the end of the Permanent Deputation. “We face a crucial moment as a country. It is a moment of collective pain but hopelessness must not paralyse us. Thank you for your attention and farewell.”
