This Wednesday inaugurates the Madrid-Asturias AVE, an infrastructure that has taken almost 20 years to complete and has cost 4,000 million euros. And the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Diaz Ayusohas made known his anger at not having been invited to the presentation of this line to which King Felipe VI will attend as the highest representative of the State as this is a work that serves for territorial cohesion between regions and between Spaniards. The response from the Madrid leader has also been resounding. According to her, her office team has moved, “community will never invite the Government to the events of the Community of Madrid, in the same way that the Government of the nation never invites the Community of Madrid. Blow for blow.”
Although the complete line runs between these two cities, what is presented this week is the section between León and Pola de Lena, the first stop that the high-speed train will have on Asturian soil. The train will also reach Oviedo and Gijón although the geography makes it difficult to travel at high speed, so the route to the main Asturian cities will be done sharing the track with local trains. The work can now finally be inaugurated after several years of engineering work in the Haystacks Variantwhere the project has been modified on several occasions and the technical difficulty is that most of this section runs between tunnels.
Precisely this is the argument that they convey from the Ministry of Transport which Óscar Puente has led since last week to have invited only the regional presidents of the two communities through which this section of the infrastructure runs, Alfonso Fernández Mañueco and Adrián Barbón.
“The presidents of the autonomous communities where it is inaugurated are invited to these commissionings.“the infrastructure, they explain from this Ministry, and remember that in the last high-speed commissioning, although the origin of all the lines is or will be the Community of Madrid, the Madrid Government was not present either. It happened on the train to Ourense in 2021 (section from Zamora) to Murcia in 2022 (from Alicante), as well as the internal section in Estremadura also in 2022 (between Cáceres and Badajoz). “The criteria is the same as always,” they add.
Discomfort in the Sun
In the regional government, however, this argument is not convincing: “The government does not invite the president of the Community of Madrid to the inauguration of the Madrid-Asturias AVE, chaired by HM the King, on Wednesday, which the Community considers a serious mistake of the Government that will have its consequences. Mr. Sánchez is the one who, personally, vetoes President Díaz Ayuso. But her wall is just a worm-eaten wall,” they denounce from the surroundings of Díaz Ayuso. “The only one missing is the president of the community of Madrid, which is where the AVE leaves from.” And hence, her reaction and her response of returning his already famous “blow for blow” and not “never” inviting the central Executive to regional events again.
The Community team goes back to the inaugurations 15 years ago to insist that the Madrid president is left aside due to political will, such as when the train arrived in Valencia in 2010 or in Valladolid in 2007, events in which she was the then president of the Community of Madrid, Esperanza Aguirre. In those years, however, the work that was put into service did begin in Madrid.
As this media has learned, the presidents of Adif and former transport ministers of recent years, whether from the PP or the PSOE, have been invited to the presentation although not all have yet confirmed their attendance.