Sánchez fights train crash fallout as Spain's election campaign begins

Spain's election campaign is officially rolling, and Pedro Sánchez opened it Thursday night in Seville with a rally staged hours before the official midnight start. He's running in red T-shirts stamped with slogans — “The Strength of Love,” “The Strength of the People,” “Vote with Strength” — through a 2 1/2-week sprint to the Nov. 29 vote. On Monday, Brazil's President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva lands in Spain to campaign at his side, after Sánchez cited leftist wins in Brazil's runoff and Democratic control of both U.S. chambers. “It has happened in Brazil, it has happened in the United States, and it will happen in Spain too. The key is mobilization,” he told La Vanguardia this week.

The disaster he's running around struck on the morning of Oct. 28, when a high-speed train south of Madrid slammed into a stationary one, killing 69 people. Minutes earlier, Sánchez had posted about reasons to be optimistic. It was Spain's second deadly rail collision this year, and until this year there had never been a fatal crash on the country's dedicated high-speed lines. Analysts told The Associated Press the lethal crashes won't be easy to downplay — Sánchez has instead folded them into his core pitch. “If there is one lesson to be drawn from the Urda rail tragedy, it is that public services matter,” he wrote on X. “This is what is at stake.”

Six days after the crash, Transport Minister Óscar Puente resigned at the tail-end of a parliamentary grilling over his handling of Spain's high-speed network, the world's second largest after China's. Sánchez and his top officials have pointed to that resignation ever since as proof of accountability, with Sánchez calling it “an act of dignity” and writing that the government “stepped forward with absolute transparency.” Sánchez himself stayed away from this week's state funeral for the victims in central Spain, where mourning families gathered. Political analyst Montserrat Nebrera, a former conservative politician, said the crash “points to a failure in management over the last eight years.”

Housing is the issue Sánchez bet on when he called the snap election, and Wednesday handed him a fresh opening: more than 100,000 people marched through Spain's major cities over soaring rents and home costs. The demonstration was part of the country's first general strike in 14 years — and the first whose main driver grew out of housing frustration. Sánchez's Socialists didn't organize or join the strike, but his government praised it, and he has courted housing activists who have protested regularly since the eviction of an 87-year-old woman.

The trigger for the early vote was the right's rejection of Sánchez's two proposed emergency housing decrees. His government pushed one of them through a smaller interim parliament on Thursday. “Yesterday, the right to housing won on the street and in workplaces, and I hope it will win again at the ballot box,” Housing Minister Isabel Rodríguez told lawmakers after it passed. Sánchez's allies hope the win, plus the Popular Party's vow to repeal the decree if it takes power, moves voters — though several opinion polls before and after the crash showed the Socialists trailing the combined support of the conservative Popular Party and far-right Vox.

Sánchez is banking on short memories, according to Complutense University political science professor Alejandro Quiroga, whose read on the strategy is that it aims to “instill a sense of hope, the idea that things can be reversed, that change is possible.” His right-wing opponents are expected to make the two crashes a central theme of debates anyway, undercutting his record. A Spanish prime minister is elected by Parliament and needs an absolute majority in the first vote or a simple majority in the second, often leaning on coalition deals, so the campaign's final stretch will decide who can assemble the numbers.