Spain's Sánchez faces political test as train crash casts shadow over election

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Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez had hoped to leverage widespread discontent over unaffordable housing when he called snap elections

Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez had hoped to leverage widespread discontent over unaffordable housing when he called snap elections

MADRID -- Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez hoped to leverage widespread discontent over unaffordable housing when he called snap elections in October. Then a high-speed train rammed into another, killing 69 people and casting a pall over the nation.

It was Spain's second deadly rail collision this year and couldn't have come at a worse time for Sánchez.

With the campaign officially underway, the 54-year-old progressive is working to keep the tragedy from derailing his message to voters. Instead, he has projected his administration as willing to assume responsibility for errors on its watch. More than that, he has folded the disaster into his campaign's main message: that a right-wing government would be worse for Spaniards, who need government help for housing, healthcare, infrastructure and more.

“If there is one lesson to be drawn from the Urda rail tragedy, it is that public services matter,” Sánchez wrote on X after the collision. “This is what is at stake.”

It may be a tough sell. Until this year, there had never been a fatal crash on Spain’s dedicated high-speed lines, and analysts told The Associated Press that the lethal crashes won't be so easy to downplay.

On the morning of Oct. 28, Sánchez was putting a message of positivity onto social media:

“There are so many reasons to be optimistic in this country. We respond to the haters with data, intelligence and humor.”

Minutes earlier, as he would soon learn, a high-speed train south of Madrid slammed into a stationary one, leaving authorities searching for dozens of bodies in the wreckage.

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