Europe Today: Second high-speed rail disaster in nine months leaves Spain in grief

Good morning, it's Thursday, October 29th. You're watching Euronews, and this is Europe Today. Our top stories. At least 68 people were killed and more than 100 others injured when two high-speed trains collided south of Madrid yesterday in one of Spain's deadliest rail disasters. The accident occurred near Urdan in the province of Toledo, on a straight section of track with good visibility. Early indications point to human error. The tragedy comes just nine months after another collision involving two high-speed trains in southern Spain that killed 46 people in January, raising serious concerns about rail safety in the country. Montreal is the host city of what one Brussels official called one of the most important summits the European Union ever held. The EU-Canada summit today and tomorrow is set to pave the way for an ever broader and deeper political partnership. leaders are expected to launch an alliance for the future a framework for shared prosperity and economic security underpinned by concrete new initiatives to strengthen people-to-people ties deepen economic relations and reinforce their joint stance on the global stage and Brazil's defeated presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro fled to Florida yesterday after the US State Department said it would issue visas to him and his family following his loss to President Lula da Silva in Sunday's run-off election. Bolsonaro, who received tacit support from US President Donald Trump, is under investigation in Brazil for alleged corruption, money laundering and tax evasion and was ordered not to leave the country. He has denied any wrongdoing. Welcome to the program, I'm Stefan Grobe. But first, the horrible train crash that shook Spain yesterday. Madrid has declared three days of national mourning after the tragedy that killed more than 68 people and injured over 100. Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who is in the midst of an election campaign, has called for an independent probe into the circumstances leading to the fatal crash, the second major collision in just nine months. Early indications point to human error, as the government faces questions over its handling of the crisis. For more on this, let's bring in our correspondent Rafael Salido, who is in front of the Hospital of Toledo. Good morning, Rafael. So what's the latest? What can you tell us? Good morning. So rescue work, rescue operations have continued throughout the night here in the outskirts of Toledo, in Urda, with canine units and drone teams expected to join this morning in the search of, hopefully, possible victims that may still be alive. As for the numbers, there hasn't been any big changes there. We're still working with a confirmed number of 68 people who died and over 100 people who got injured, 18 of them severely injured. Among them was a former secretary of the government, Fatima Banyeth. But that's so far all that is new today. Will this tragedy affect the ongoing election campaign? Oh, yes. Surely it's going to have an impact. As you know, Spain is holding general elections on November the 29th, so it's one month away. Yesterday, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez came to the place where the accident took place, and he promised there would be accountability. However, there's already people calling for the resignation of the Transportation Secretary, Oscar Puente, and parties from the opposition are demanding full accountability. This may become a huge liability for Prime Minister Sánchez just weeks ahead of the election. So he has made a commitment to find whomever was responsible, And he has even talked about the possibility if the maintenance was the issue, which would point directly to a responsibility from the government, he is willing to renew the whole truck system in Spain, which would be a humongous task. All right, Rafael Salido, live from Toledo, thank you very much. EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and EU Council President Antonio Costa have landed in Montreal to attend the highly anticipated EU-Canada summit with Prime Minister Mark Carney. Brussels wants to expand the relation and make Canada its closest non-European ally. Joining me now is our political correspondent Jorge Liberero, who once lived in Montreal himself. Jorge, good morning. This summit couldn't really be understood without Donald Trump. Now, how long is the shadow of the U.S. president, really? The European Union and Canada are bound by the same trauma, Donald Trump. Both have been the target of his tariffs, his demands, his attacks, and even his threats of annexation. So they have found comfort in each other. This has been particularly acute for Canada because its relation with the United States, its biggest trading partner, has absolutely collapsed. We have seen Prime Minister Marconi traveling around the world, desperately looking for new partners. And the European Union, with its huge single market and its democratic values, is the perfect option. So in the run-up of the summit, the headline-making issue was the associate membership of Canada. That was eventually shut down by a couple of member states What happened? Look, we need to go back last month Ursula von der Leyen delivers her State of the Union speech in Strasbourg And all of a sudden she introduces this idea of making Canada The first ever associate member of the European Union In front of Mark Carney Everybody's surprised and everybody's confused Member states have a lot of questions about what this concept means in practice And they're also a bit resentful about the fact that von der Leyen did not consult with them before making this announcement. So what happened this week is that Germany led a push to basically kill the concept. And any mention of associate membership has been deleted from the joint declaration. And now we only see an ever closer association, which is very different. But how much of a defeat is this? I mean, what's in a name, right? Yes, I think it's a personal defeat for her because she was fully invested in this concept. She believes it's an opportunity to create a brand new geopolitical concept to export our appeal and our influence abroad. And she's convinced that it's the right thing to do. So this makes me think that she's not going to give it up just yet. In fact, yesterday, just as she landed in Montreal, she once again tweeted about the need, the ambition of making Canada, an associate member. So for now, let me tell you, she's determined to make it happen. All right, Jorge de Boer, ex-inhabitant of Montreal, thank you very much. Well, just days before the midterm elections in the United States, President Donald Trump is stoking the fire of distrust in an echo of his ongoing conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. He promised, with unclear legal authority, to pay $1 million to anyone who exposes election fraud that leads to a criminal conviction. It's a series of tactics that experts say is less about law enforcement than about messaging, pre-spinning likely Republican losses and driving up public doubts about the results. Should America be prepared for an avalanche of lawsuits attacking Democratic victories, as Trump has promised? Earlier, I put this question to Alan Lichtman, historian and one of the country's best-known political analysts from American University in Washington. Here's what he said. Americans should be very much prepared for Trump, if, as expected, his party loses this midterm election, to try to overturn the results by any means at his disposal, including lawsuits an avalanche. But remember, he lost every significant lawsuit, more than 60 of them last time after the 2020 election, including some before judges appointed by Trump himself. So Trump's approval ratings have hit record lows and Democratic enthusiasm levels are off the charts. Do you expect a really big night for Democrats? Well, it's always perilous to predict midterm elections. I have a system for presidential elections, not midterms. But you're right. When an approval rating for a president is this low, historically, they lose about 40 House seats and six Senate seats. That's an average, not a prediction. How much of the current Democratic polling lead is due to the unpopularity of Trump and how much to Democratic policies? I think it's mostly due to the unpopularity of Trump, the Democratic lead in polling. Midterm elections are the one chance voters have to register approval or disapproval of a sitting president and his administration. And the truth is, for candidates of the president's party, no matter how hard you try, you can't run away from the president. And Democrats, you know, I've been criticizing them for years. They really have not developed, and they could and should, a compelling message for their policies and ideas. And what will be Trump's political agenda for his remaining two years in office following the midterms? Well, you know, Trump never really has had a legislative agenda. He governs, you know, as an aspiring authoritarian. He governs by executive order, essentially bypassing the legislature. He only had one big legislative victory, his tax and spending bill. So I expect he will govern once again by executive order, perhaps even more aggressively if, in fact, the House and the Senate or either one of them turns Democratic. So when I talk to the pundits, the strategists, the observers, they tell me that Trump over the last two years of his term will be occupied by, you know, subpoenas and lawsuits, et cetera, and the Iran war. Do you share that? No question, Democrats will investigate, investigate, investigate the Iran war, the corruption, the grifting, the revenge tours. But none of that is going to stop Trump because he doesn't care. You can't shame Donald Trump. You can try impeaching him. That hasn't worked before in the Senate. He's been acquitted. It won't work again. US historian Alan Lichtman from American University in Washington. Ukrainian President Zelensky says his country is still waiting for the Pentagon to sign off on defense Patriot interceptors, while Russia continues to pound Kyiv with ballistic missiles. Ukraine receives Patriot systems from a special mechanism at NATO, where allies purchase US-made weapons to transfer to Ukraine for the war. But lately confusion reigns as to what exactly is happening, and more importantly, when will Ukraine receive the Patriots? Let's make sense of all this with our NATO correspondent, Shona Murray, here on the set. Good morning, Shona. So I guess the basic question is, why is Ukraine so reliant on these Patriots? Well, quite frankly, because the PAC-3 Patriot system is the most advanced technology to intercept the Russian ballistic missiles that are raining down on Kyiv. Europeans don't have anything comparable. But these are very complex systems. They cost about $4 million for one of the missiles. and they can cost a billion dollars just for the whole system itself. And the problem is there's a global shortage because the United States has burned through its stockpiles because of the war in Iran. And why is Washington delaying them? Well, that is the key question. Nobody knows exactly why this is happening. Some people believe that maybe it's about resuming the war in Iran. The United States needs its stockpiles. But others are saying that perhaps that the United States is trying to pressurize President Zelensky, as we know, into stopping attacking Russian diesel refineries. head of the U.S. midterms where we know the United States President Donald Trump is not doing so well in the polls. So I caught up with former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Kurt Volker who believes that this may be the case. President Trump is seeing what everyone is seeing, that it's going to go very, very badly for the Republicans, certainly losing the House of Representatives, probably also losing the Senate at this stage is the way it looks, although you never know. And he wants to be seen to be doing something about the issues that are making voters unhappy. One of them is the price of diesel, and that particularly affects farmers, red state voters in the Midwest and the United States. So he wants to be seen to be doing something about that. So he thought it would be a great story for him to be able to say, I've got Vladimir Putin giving us diesel, and I've got Zelensky to stop attacking the refineries. So I'm fighting for you. I'm on your side. The problem with that is it is an insignificant amount of diesel. It won't do anything to US or global prices. All right, Sean Amari, thanks for breaking it all down for us. And now to the energy crisis. The European Commission is treating the loss of refining capacity as a vulnerability that Europe can no longer afford to ignore. Energy Commissioner Dan Jorgensen warned that the prolonged war in the Middle East should serve as a wake-up call. The EU should ensure that there is an adequate refining capacity at home, he said. This morning came as the prices for crude oil and diesel rose across the board yesterday. Markets reacted to reports that the US is preparing to renew strikes against Iran after the midterm elections. To discuss the latest developments, I'm now joined by Osama Rizvi, global markets and product strategist at Primary Vision in Lahore. Good morning to you. Good morning to you as well, Stefan. I'm in UAE at the moment right now. Wonderful. So oil, diesel and gas prices are all up again. Are we witnessing another temporary market panic or the beginning of a much bigger energy crisis? Well, it has never been temporary since the start of the war, actually. Whatever you see right now is a long extension and rather something that has become a structural feature characteristic of the market. Whether the wars restarts or not, whether there is an escalation or not, it is going to take some months for the supplies to restore and hence for the refiners to get what they want and hence for the prices to come down and consumers to feel okay. So this is a structural baked-in factor, unfortunately, and we'll have to suffer from it for the next 7 to 12 months minimum. Why are especially diesel prices rising so sharply? Is there something fundamentally wrong with the global market for refined fuels? Well, diesel, above all the fuels, is really central to the global economy. Up-country movement, down-country movement, agriculture, farmers, all of them, food transportation, they use diesel as a feedstock, right? So diesel has low stocks already globally. Then we discussed it last time as well, lots of refineries are closing down. 1.5 million barrels of refined products going down as well in Europe. 10 to 15 percent of refining capacity has been disrupted in the previous few years so all of that had culminated into what is called a diesel crisis and many analysts are i'm also on the verge of declaring this this war is actually a diesel war it's becoming a diesel war and uh that is going to choke the global economy if it gets worse and um europe seems particularly exposed to the diesel crunch and the comments of Commissioner Jorgensen is testament to that. Why is the continent still so vulnerable to disruptions in global fuel supplies? Well, interestingly, and, you know, Europe has had some issues with the policymaking, policy direction, actually, according to myself. The shift or move for renewables, at times we saw that triumphed the realities of the energy security and hence we are what we are seeing right now is that there is a crisis of refining there is a crisis of diesel uh production plus diesel uh reserves moving forward i think it will really benefit not only europe but also the world and this is happening east of suez actually that there needs to be a refining uh you know revolution in the world more refineries spread across the world so that they don't become vulnerable to such uh geopolitical crisis and And Osama, if tensions in the Middle East ease tomorrow, how quickly would oil and diesel prices actually fall? I don't think it is going to be very quickly. The crude oil prices, yes, they can fall. We have seen some restoration of both the flows through Hormuz and the production facilities in the Gulf. So that is one thing. However, that reaching to the refineries will still involve a lot of high transportation costs. $3 of transportation cost before the war. Now it costs around $20 to transport the same oil. So it is going to take three to five months for this to die down and the dust to settle down. So well into next year then? Definitely. All right. Osama Rizvi, as always, thank you for your analysis. And that's all for today. Thank you for watching. I'm Stefan Grobe and I see you tomorrow.