The image of unity presented by Pedro Sanchez And Carlos Mazon During their joint appearance this Thursday, it is about to reveal itself like a mirage. The government has begun to launch a campaign to hold the president of the Valencian Community responsible for the catastrophic loss of life left by DANA.
The baseness of this reproach becomes even more blatant if we compare it to the elegance that Mazón showed towards the president.thanking him for his “proximity” and his “very rapid response”.
The main argument put forward is that the Regional Executive should have taken the decision earlier to issue an emergency alert due to the torrential flooding. And the Valencian Generalitat has surely made mistakes, which will be evaluated at that time.
But today, with nearly 160 dead and 250 people still missing, Priority should be collaboration in localization and support tasks. It will then be time to honor the victims and begin reconstruction work. And finally, it will be time to debate, in a conciliatory spirit and in good faith, the measures to be taken to improve prevention protocols and avoid such tragedies in the future.
The government has nothing to gain by blaming Mazón for what happened.
Firstly because it is debatable whether another Administration would have been capable of much better management of an unprecedented natural disaster whose scale far exceeded AEMET’s forecasts. The same requirement for understanding that this government asked for during its management of the pandemic must now be applied to an equally exceptional situation.
Secondly, and also drawing a comparison with the case of Covid-19 management, it is not logical for the Government to claim that the impact of DANA depends on the preparedness policies adopted in each community. ¿Or maybe Sánchez did not take sole command of action against the health crisis despite the fact that powers in this matter are transferred to the LACC?
This is in fact the weakest point of the Executive’s strategy. Because on Tuesday evening, he could have raised the alert level 2 decreed by Mazón to level 3, which would have authorized the Ministry of the Interior to take exclusive management of the civil protection system. But he decided not to do so, believing that the Generalitat was proceeding appropriately.
And even after excluding the declaration of a state of emergency, current legislation allows the central government to send an emergency alert to the population. Sánchez could have imitated the recent example of Joe Bidenwho personally helped warn the American public that sheltering from Hurricane Milton “is literally a matter of life and death.”
That is to say something similar to what he did this Thursday, asking the Valencians to “stay at home” because “DANA continues”.
And if it is a question of reproaching the delay in the action of the Government of the Valencian Generalitat, what can we say of that of the Central Government? Couldn’t he have brought together the crisis committee before Tuesday evening? Or having interrupted road traffic in the middle of the day?
Not to mention that the president only returned to Spain on Wednesday morning. It is ironic that the message in which Sánchez claimed to “follow closely” the information on the missing was written from India.
It is legitimate to suspect that this denial campaign is precisely linked to the government’s indignation at the fact that Feijóo preceded Sánchez by going to the disaster zone. And what’s more, he did it to see himself with Emiliano García-Page. Is he also the socialist president of what happened in the province of Albacete?
It is not a question of avoiding necessarily rethinking a civil protection mechanism whose agility can clearly be improved. But neither is it about launching a little battle for history to shift the pace of public conversation in a more government-friendly direction. Because there will surely be as many reasons to criticize the central State as the autonomous administrations.
