Spain’s Train Wrecks and the Price of Political Decay

On 18 January, two high-speed trains collided near Adamuz, in the province of Córdoba, Spain. One of them derailed on a stretch of track that had recently been modernised. Forty-five people lost their lives. Two days later, a separate incident in Catalonia claimed the life of another machinist. These events, taken together, cannot be dismissed as isolated incidents or unfortunate coincidences. They reveal something more structural: the deterioration of Spain’s institutional capacity to govern critical infrastructure.

Governments routinely frame such events as “tragic” and “exceptional”. Yet large-scale infrastructure failures rarely stem from a single technical cause. They emerge from systems in which accountability is absent. And, sadly so, Adamuz was the predictable outcome of institutional neglect.

Spain’s railway system is overwhelmingly public and centrally managed. This matters because it removes the usual alibi. There is no private monopoly to denounce, no market failure to scapegoat. What remains is political stewardship —or the lack of it.

In recent years, railway systems in Spain, as well as many other critical infrastructure, have been dealt with politically rather than according to technical need, and long-term maintenance has been subordinated to short-term political incentives. As a result, this is not an administrative accident. It is a mode of governance that has proven deadly to so many innocent people.

The deeper problem revealed by this train wreckage is the systematic subordination of institutions to politics. Since 2018, Spain has been governed by a left-wing coalition that no longer treats the state as a structure requiring discipline, continuity, and professional stewardship, but as an instrument for rent-seeking, narrative control, and political survival.

Within such a system, institutions are no longer evaluated on the basis of performance, reliability, or outcomes. They are judged by alignment—by ideological loyalty and political usefulness. Competence is displaced by obedience; expertise by affiliation. Loyalty becomes the primary currency of advancement, while responsibility is diluted and failure carries no consequence.

The result is a hollowed-out state: omnipresent in rhetoric, omniscient in messaging, yet fragile in reality. A state capable of issuing statements and forming narratives, but increasingly incapable of delivering what citizens most fundamentally require—competent governance, tangible solutions, and basic safety.

At that point, institutional failure ceases to be a technical concern and becomes a political one. A state that cannot guarantee the protection of life forfeits its most basic claim to legitimacy. If not through the ballot box, then through incompetence.

Institutional Decline

Institutional decay rarely exists in isolation from moral decay. Spain’s recent political history has been defined by a succession of corruption scandals involving senior ministers and political appointees, many of them directly responsible for overseeing public services and critical infrastructure.

These include cases involving personal misconduct of ministers and top public officials during pandemic lockdowns —including soliciting prostitutes—, and commissions on emergency medical procurement contracts (e.g. masks), and from major energy deals during the height of the post-Ukraine energy crisis. Perhaps the most noteworthy example is that of José Luis Ábalos, former Minister of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda, to whom the Supreme Court has ordered his provisional detention without bail and awaits his day in court. While ordinary citizens endured confinement, inflation, and economic uncertainty, a narrow political class prospered.

This is not simply a question of personal vice. Corruption corrodes institutions. A political elite that treats the state as a private estate will inevitably neglect the systems entrusted to it. The same logic that tolerates impunity also tolerates deferred maintenance, ignored warnings, and frozen budgets. Eventually, that negligence manifests itself in physical failure — and human cost.

Socialism’s deepest failure is not, in the end, an economic one. It is institutional. By presenting the state as morally virtuous by definition, socialism transforms public power into something that claims legitimacy not through performance or accountability, but through intention. Once the state is framed as inherently “on the right side of history,” criticism is no longer treated as a necessary democratic function. It is delegitimised as malice, reaction, or sabotage.

In this moralised framework, accountability itself is redefined. Failures are not errors to be corrected, but attacks to be repelled. Oversight is dismissed as obstructionism. Scrutiny is portrayed by those in power not simply as partisan hostility, but as something “undemocratic” in spirit. The result is a political culture in which responsibility evaporates, consequences disappear, and resignation becomes unthinkable.

Spain under Pedro Sánchez illustrates this pathology with disturbing clarity. His government has systematically obscured the boundary between state and party, power and narrative. Through extensive public funding and financial dependency, the major media outlets have been effectively co-opted into the government’s ecosystem, casting doubt on their willingness—and ability—to report critically on mismanagement, corruption, or institutional failure. When media oversight weakens, political accountability follows. What remains is a closed circuit of power, messaging, and impunity.

In such an environment, institutional degradation is not an accident. It is the natural outcome of a system in which no one is truly answerable, where failure carries no cost, and where the preservation of power overrides the maintenance of the state itself.

Adamuz, therefore, should not be understood merely as a human tragedy, however devastating it may be. It is a case study in what happens when institutional quality is sacrificed to ideology; when moral decay is normalised at the highest levels of government; and when the state ceases to function as a system of restraint, continuity, and responsibility, and instead becomes an object of political capture.

Institutions are the backbone of statecraft. When institutions function properly, citizens may disagree with governments yet still trust the system. When they fail, trust collapses—not only in those temporarily in power, but in political parties, public authority, and the regime as a whole.

Institutional failure is therefore uniquely corrosive. It does not merely produce inefficiency; it undermines confidence in the state’s capacity to govern. Over time, dysfunction becomes familiar, excuses become routine, and lowered expectations are internalised. What should provoke outrage is rebranded as misfortune. What should trigger accountability is absorbed as background noise.

The lesson of Spain’s railway tragedy is unmistakable. When institutions decay, malfunction ceases to be an anomaly and becomes the norm —until reality intervenes with force. Tragedy is no longer an exception; it is the inevitable consequence of prolonged neglect. Spain is now paying the price of this process, not in human lives.

That is why Adamuz cannot be treated as a closed chapter or a technical mishap. It is a political warning. And warnings of this magnitude demand more than investigations and condolences. They require urgent political change —before institutional failure claims its next victims.