The general secretary of the PPE (European People’s Party) and vice-president of the PPE group in the European Parliament, Dolors Montserrat, said this Thursday in Salamanca that the Partido Popular will focus so that the rail corridor of the Ruta de la Plata will be operational again in 2040 "and not in the year 2050 as Puente and Sánchez have proposed."
Along these lines, she stressed that this is an initiative that the PPE has already supported in European institutions, where the PP backed an amendment so that the Ruta de la Plata would be included as an advanced core network.
Dolors Montserrat held the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, responsible for having left "cast aside and abandoned" Castilla y León and Salamanca in the defense of the infrastructure that the region needs before Europe.
The People’s Party leader added that the lack of Budgets in Spain causes the destination of the Next Generation funds to be unknown, funds that were also conceived to support the railway, and she denounced that the rail connections of Castilla y León have not been prioritized in European planning.
Likewise, Montserrat reproached Sánchez for not defending the interests of Castilla y León, unlike the Partido Popular which, as she has claimed, managed to get its amendments through in the European Parliament. "The problem is that in the Council, which is where the prime ministers are, Sánchez has not defended it," she said.
The Catalan politician insisted that Europe is "constantly monitoring" the actions of the Government of Spain, "not only in the breach of the rule of law, in the targeting of judges, the targeting of the media that explain the corruption cases surrounding the family, the party and Sánchez’s government, but also in the money that belongs to everyone," she emphasized.
In this regard, she recalled that the Next Generation funds do not belong "to any ideology or to any government; they are the property of all Europeans, of all Spaniards. And this money hasn’t reached the real economy, it hasn’t reached the pockets of the Spaniards," she lamented.
Montserrat has stated that "we are the second country in Europe that had to receive the most European funds. We had to receive 160,000 million euros. We have only received 100,000 because Sánchez's Government has not claimed the rest, the 60,000. And of these 100,000 that we have received, only 56 percent has been carried out. Therefore, we have missed the unique opportunity, not only to modernize the economy, but also to improve and modernize the infrastructure," the general secretary of the EPP has criticized.