Restoring decency: Spain's state collapse laid bare

In ABC, Ignacio Camacho argues that the rail accidents at Urda and Adamuz are the culmination of eight years of political and institutional collapse, and contends that the urgent task is not ideological but to restore decency to public life.

Columnist **Ignacio Camacho** publishes an article in **ABC** entitled "Restoring decency" in which he reads the rail accidents at **Urda** and **Adamuz** as the crowning moment of a state collapse. For Camacho, political change is now a democratic imperative, although the electoral impact of the disaster is, in his view, impossible to calculate for now.

## A wrecked campaign and electoral calculations

The piece describes an election campaign wrecked by the Urda accident. While the victims mourn, according to the columnist, party leaderships are working out how to reshape it: the Government tries to divert public attention away from the rail tragedy, while the opposition seeks to keep the catastrophe as the symbolic centrepiece of a project of structural and sarracena regeneration for Spain. Camacho reckons that, once the funerals are over, there will be three weeks to patch together talking points on the fly.

On the impact at the ballot box, the writer offers no figures: he considers it impossible to calculate beyond the polls. He does assert that if this is not the end of sanchismo (Pedro Sánchez's political movement), nothing will be for a long time. And he warns that if the Government of **Pedro Sánchez** survives two almost identical disasters surrounded by evidence of maintenance failures, the conclusion must be that society has become immune to systemic chaos.

## Eight years of collapse and 125 people under investigation

Camacho frames both accidents within what he calls eight years of political, institutional, ethical and practical collapse of the state, aggravated by a term of office marked by scandals. He cites the amnesty law, the invasion of Ceuta and a string of court cases with **125 people under investigation**, culminating in the double dramatic impact of the crashed trains. He defines Sánchez's power as a regime, because, in his view, any power that rejects alternation is a regime or aspires to be one.

The columnist acknowledges that, in a less polarised electorate, replacing an executive worn down by negligent management and scorched by parliamentary deadlock would be a democratic imperative. But the existence of a vote he describes as antifactual and armoured against reality under a shell of sectarian instinct leaves him in doubt about the pollsters' forecasts of change.

## The inheritance awaiting the alternative

If change comes, Camacho anticipates a complex task: repairing the institutional breakdown it will inherit. Repealing or replacing the most controversial laws and measures of sanchismo seems to him relatively easy. What will be slow is rebuilding the deterioration accumulated over nearly a decade in strategic infrastructure, public services, energy or housing, an effort that will test the internal cohesion of the expected alliance of Spain's two main right-wing parties.

The columnist argues that the transformation most Spaniards await, including the sensible wing of the left, is not ideological, social, economic or financial. It is, he writes, about returning public life to an acceptable standard of decency. The article offers no data of its own on the technical causes of the accidents or the state of rail maintenance; those claims are the author's thesis.