The spokesperson for Esquerra Republicana (ERC) in Congress and head of the list for the elections on November 29, Gabriel Rufián, said this Wednesday that the resignation of the former Minister of Transport, Óscar Puente, a week after the Urda (Toledo) incident, amounts to a "distraction" because, in his view, what matters now is to provide answers to the problem of the "insecurity" and "inefficiency" that the rail system suffers from.
This is how he responded to the media when he was asked whether he considers Puente’s departure from the Government sufficient. On Tuesday, he went over to him in Congress to say goodbye and recognize him as "a great minister", a gesture that was captured by television cameras.
Rufián began by saying that politics "has to be humanized" and stressing that it is indifferent to him what has been published about that gesture toward the minister because, as he has admitted, the calculations about whether he is or is not in the campaign are given to him "regularly".
Responsibilities assumed and criticism of the rail model
Even so, he has valued that Puente took on responsibilities "that were logical", but he has insisted that "the key is the precariousness, the insecurity and the inefficiency of the rail system, specifically of high-speed rail and commuter trains".
"I think Puente was a distraction because here the important thing is knowing whether people are safe or not on an AVE, or whether people get on a piece of shit train or not every morning, and the answer is that no and that yes: people are not safe and they go on absolutely deplorable trains", he concluded.
He made these statements in the context of the press call held in Madrid by the family of Guillem Agulló, the young Valencian man murdered in 1993 by a neo-Nazi group, in which they made public the letter sent to the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, and to the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska.