Another Wednesday at the office, but after a terrible night in the Valencian Community. The Popular Party arrived at nine in the morning with the usual ammunition, among which this time was the case of Íñigo Errejón. Perhaps he had doubts, but from the start his deputies started shooting. It didn’t take long for them to realize that they were going to be sad. But they tried. They asked three questions with which they were not seeking information, but rather to shout. The normal thing during the control session. For example, Ester Muñoz’s question: “How long will they continue to support corruption?”
Twenty minutes after the start of the session, the PP leadership decided to slow down and request the suspension of the plenary session. The majority of the government accepted it for the control session, but not for the second plenary session convened immediately afterwards, whose only item on the agenda was to approve the reform of the election of the board of directors of RTVE. Alberto Núñez Feijóo saw that he had fallen into the trap and reacted angrily. He made this very clear during an appearance before journalists, during which he did not accept questions. Logically, he would have been asked why he had used the control session to his advantage until he realized the consequences it would have on his image.
The sequence of events was revealing. Cuca Gamarra made reference at the beginning to the tragedy of Valencia and ended by giving a circus trick to the problem envisaged. Faced with this emergency, institutions are very important, he said, and “hence the relevance of this question”. Double somersault and here is the question: “Which institution will the government attack tomorrow?” María Jesús Montero responded that it would be appropriate to show citizens, at this time, the unity of political parties, especially “those with governmental powers.”
Gamarra continued to push with what he had prepared from home. “Today is not the day,” Montero replied. PP deputy Rafael Hernando was heard saying out loud: “Do you want to close Congress? » Hernando is dedicated to making comments at every plenary session, especially when everyone else is silent. He is a bit of a contender for improvised comic interventions. Little did he know that his party would attempt to do just that very soon.
Among the PP seats, the desire to start a fight like other Wednesdays was not appreciated. It was clearer in the second question. Jaime de Olano’s mission was to punish Yolanda Díaz based on what he knew about Errejón: “If the plenary session was not suspended, the opposition has the obligation to control the government.” “You’re the one in the Nevenka case,” Díaz told him. In other circumstances, the PP benches would have lit up upon hearing this. Not this time. His doubts grew.
Third question with Ester Muñoz. “Today is the only day I would like to not ask for anything,” he said. He said they had time to suspend the plenary session, but he immediately turned to Errejón’s question to accuse Díaz of covering it up. He did the same thing in the reply.
When the vice-president raised the third volume of the judgment of the Gürtel of the National Court – she had brought it from the office – the headquarters of Genoa rehabilitated with black money and the accusation of number three of Díaz Ayuso, it was already too much for the PP. This had to be removed. Hitting, but less than usual, did not suit him.
Its spokesperson, Miguel Tellado, rose to request the suspension of the plenary session “out of respect for the victims of DANA”. Cuca Gamarra listened to him with the air of attending a funeral. Francina Armengol summoned the Council and recalled that no one had requested the cancellation of the session before it began. The PP could also have refused to ask the questions in the chamber, thus depriving the control session of all its meaning.
The plenary session began with a minute of silence for the victims of Valencia. Ultimately, the Congressional Council canceled the remainder of the oversight session and then the committees scheduled for the day were suspended. The PSOE held the second plenary session dedicated to the debate and vote on the decree to renew the RTVE Council, a controversial decision, but conditioned by the interim position, politely formulated, in which the company’s management finds itself. The mandate of Concepción Cascajosa, elected president in March, lasted only six months, which ended at the end of September.
The reform would put an end to this situation of paralysis. Of course, this is also done so that government parties and their allies obtain a majority in the Council for six years. The list of its future members, revealed subsequently, reveals the scandalous presence of several candidates without experience in television or without any experience in media management.
This is the reason why the PP resumed the style of the control session which had been interrupted earlier. Núñez Feijóo was furious with a speech addressed to journalists who could do nothing but write his message. Perhaps he thought answering questions would be disrespectful to the victims.
He declared that the decision to lead the debate on the RTVE decree was intolerable: “This attitude is despicable”. “We have completely paralyzed political activity in Spain due to the lower number of victims compared to those that have taken place currently,” he declared before hammering the government again by asserting that there is no had “no example of moral turpitude like this”.
Although the PP made it clear that it was necessary to cancel any type of political activity in Parliament that day, this did not count towards Feijóo’s clearly political declaration of intent. Not even to ask questions beforehand about the Errejón case.
The leader of the PP also announced that he planned to go to the Valencian Community as soon as possible to “be with them (the region’s authorities), shake their hands and express my solidarity.” One might think that at the moment the priority of the Valencian government, chaired by Carlos Mazón, of the PP, should be to save people and mitigate the effects of the disaster. Not by receiving the president of the party.
In the afternoon, Feijóo got the image he was looking for. In the absence of Valencia, in the afternoon he visited the forward command post of Letur, Albacete, accompanied by the president of the PP of Castile-La Mancha, and met with the president of the region, Emiliano García-Page . The visit to Valencia is scheduled for Thursday morning and there you can take photos with Mazón, who now badly needs the support of his party. Pedro Sánchez will also be in Valencia on Thursday. The race for photos exists in these cases, as does the need for everyone, governments and opposition, to show their solidarity in person. For what it might be worth.
At the start of the plenary session, we already knew that the number of confirmed deaths was around fifty and that it was inevitable that it would increase in the following hours. Following an official declaration of mourning, like the one approved by the government shortly before lunch, the activity of parliaments is suspended, like many others. It is never clear to what extent disaster victims benefit from MPs returning home or to party headquarters. Of course, in the ministries and autonomous governments concerned, all efforts are devoted to warding off the effects of the disaster. Parliamentarians have no assigned tasks in these emergency tasks.
There is a comparison that is hurtful. The deputies were unable to do their job, but the day before no one thought that many workers should have left their businesses or shopping centers earlier to avoid being trapped by the storm. They didn’t leave them.
The PP feared that a control session with the highest temperature would prompt its rivals to bring up the political responsibilities of the Mazón government, as premature as that may have seemed at the time. Five days earlier, AEMET experts already warned that a DANA was approaching with the “potential” of becoming one of the most dangerous ever known. “It is likely that in certain areas of the Valencian Community and Murcia there will be more than 150 mm of rain,” it was announced three days earlier. Tuesday at ten a.m., AEMET declared the situation on red alert: “Extreme caution! The danger is extreme. “Don’t go near canals or boulevards.”
It is very difficult to accurately predict these extremely localized extreme events, but experts recommend taking preventative measures and not becoming complacent.
In an appearance that he will now regret, Mazón made a statement on Tuesday at 1 p.m. announcing that the worst was over and that by six in the afternoon the storm would have reduced its intensity in the Valencia region.
Tuesday at 8:12 p.m., the alert from the Valencian Generalitat automatically reached all cell phones in the province of Valencia. It was already too late and hundreds of people found themselves trapped in serious or dramatic circumstances. “I had to open the (car) window to get my head out because the water was almost up to my chest. I put my cell phone up so I could communicate. Around eight o’clock, when I was in water up to my neck for an hour and I was swallowing mud, the Civil Protection alert sounded,” one of the people who suffered the effects of the flood.
To close the day, Mazón declared on Twitter at 11:00 p.m. that the emergency number 112 “is not down” although at that time thousands of people were trying to call this number without receiving an answer and without alternative communication methods working.
In addition to putting a black ball on his Twitter account, hopefully someone will take responsibility for these mistakes and the lack of foresight in the face of the arrival of an extreme storm, despite the fact that it was impossible to knowing with complete certainty the extent of what was going to happen. We will have to believe that no one considers that this assumption of political responsibilities is a lack of respect towards the victims.
