With the government of the Spanish State without being formed, we will enter a new electoral year and once again we will have the honour of receiving the visit of politicians in our peoples. Once again they will approach citizenship, walking through the peoples with their followers and without any impediment to dismissing all those in front. With a smile on the left and on the right, they will let themselves be touched as human beings, they will go to the fairs, showing their pleasant and loving faces, giving their hand to everything that approaches and even if they do not approach. With kindness and sometimes tenderness, how good you are and what chinchos, no tie! They tell us about agricultural development and the importance of Álava for territorial cohesion.

It is a year since the alternative to the Social Train promoted by the platforms of Araba, Navarra and Burgos was presented. This alternative has been drafted by a team of engineers and financed with the economic support of people through crowdfunding. The alternative collects the contributions of the councils, allows for greater consensus and greater territorial cohesion, better adapts to the needs of the population and, at the same time, gains technical capacities, such as freight transport and a much smaller environmental impact.

The alternative is to keep current stops and attractions and open new ones. This helps structure the province and also allows to increase services, frequencies, performance and speeds by improving travel times. It would also involve the creation of jobs and the recovery of occupation in the rail sector by revitalising professional activity heavily penalised by the crisis and railway policies of the past.

Future rail infrastructures must respond to a key issue for Álava: freight transport. In this sense, the alternative offers an efficient and competitive rail network connected with the production plants and the main industrial sites of Álava. In addition, there should be a reduction in the environmental impact, which in some cases would go unnoticed, since most of the infrastructure would remain within an anthropometric corridor in which the landscape has already interiorized the current rail route.

This alternative saves EUR 2 billion from the new infrastructure proposed by the government, with very similar travel times. For example, ten more minutes between Burgos and Vitoria and eight more minutes between Vitoria and Pamplona. Furthermore, it must be borne in mind that if the alternative were to be carried out, one railway infrastructure should be maintained instead of two.

When they come to the people to talk about rural development, they should talk about development that four do at the expense of the rural environment. Otherwise, it is not understood that a project is not developed as the alternative proposed as public sector manager and server or, at least, that it does not have the dignity to analyze the alternative and open a serious debate about this mega-infrastructure.

They now want to sacrifice us for renewable energies, on the pretext of the energy transition. The European funds distributed by the Next Generation EU programme are being used for private companies and our peoples are being colonized for a little money.

Obviously, we must change, but towards another model that puts society at the centre, with a new decentralized and distributed electricity system, socialising energy through energy communities, as is being done in over 80 councils. That is rural development and progress!

Rural development is an initiative that improves the quality of life in rural areas. Political gentlemen, if you really want a living Álava, an environment full of peoples and life, listen to those of us who live in the villages and gather the support of every popular proposal and initiative, analyze and open serious and participatory debates, because infrastructure development policies can be done in many ways: rural development or rural colonialism.

Endika Ruiz de Loizaga, citizen of rural Alavés