“I have no information from the central government. Not at all, none. In times of national emergency, in addition to humanity and sensitivity, collaboration is necessary. The leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, went to Valencia on Thursday to take a photo with the president of the Generalitat, Carlos Mazón, and to criticize the central government for its alleged lack of information and collaboration in the disaster caused by DANA. Just a few minutes after these words, Mazón appeared with the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, whom he then thanked for “all the coordinated decisions.” “This collaboration and this communication are fundamental, necessary. “We will continue with them.” The difference between the words of one and the other is that which goes from the role of regional leader, responsible and competent in what happened, to that of the paratrooper who comes to try to make political profit from a misfortune. A behavior that Feijóo has become a trademark of the house since his arrival on the political front almost two decades ago.
“No one died in the fires and, with them, four people.” In January 2007, four months before the municipal elections, Feijóo, who led the opposition in Galicia, launched the pre-campaign from the town of Carballo, A Coruña. At an event in which then-PP President Mariano Rajoy openly called for a vote, Feijóo attacked the bipartisan government for its handling of the previous summer’s wave of fires, during which he himself was photographed brandishing an ember towards some embers. Garden hose dressed in shirt, shoes and jeans.
This wave burned, according to Xunta, 77,000 hectares between August 3 and 15, although the most popular, using purported NASA data, multiplied this figure to 175,000 before any official count was known . On the second day of the fires, Friday August 4, two women – mother and daughter – had a small accident in their car, which was surrounded by flames in Cotobade (Pontevedra, today Cerdedo-Cotobade). Both died of asphyxiation from smoke. The same thing happened a few days later to a 70-year-old man who was battling another outbreak in Campo Lameiro. The disastrous poker game ended with the death of another septuagenarian in A Cañiza, also in the province of Pontevedra. He died with 25% of his body burned after apparently falling while trying to defend his home from a fire.
The sentence he said to Carballo came back like a boomerang to Feijóo three years later. On August 12, 2010, while the PP was back in Xunta, two members of the brigade, aged 27 and 35, died in a forest fire in Fornelos de Montes. And this time, there was the responsibility of the autonomous government. This was what the Superior Court of Xustiza of Galicia ruled in 2017, finding that the “poor functioning of public services” contributed to the fatal outcome. Moreover, that same fall, in a wave that awaited the end of summer, four other people lost their lives. But the president of the Xunta had long regretted his comments.
Since his electoral victory – and especially since the death of the members of the brigade – Feijóo has chosen to divert attention from the work of the administration and put it on the “criminal activity” of the arsonists. Ecological disasters have become a problem of public order, of “organized terrorist plots” against which the central government of Zapatero or the Ministry of the Interior of Rubalcaba have done nothing. Once again the ball is in Madrid’s court, as he tried to do this Thursday from Valencia, supporting Mazón himself who will later express his gratitude to Sánchez, and defending the role of regional presidents facing the central executive.
“They are the ones who bore the weight of this national emergency” and were “a pineapple”, an “example of collaboration and solidarity”. Feijóo could not help but speak about himself: “I have been regional president for a long time and I know the loneliness of a regional president who does not have all the tools and yet the citizens ask him for responsibilities additional. For this reason, faced with an action by the Generalitat of which he says he is “proud”, he only questioned the warnings launched by two state entities: AEMET and the Hydrographic Confederation: “No one can make decisions based on on information that may be accurate, may be inaccurate, or may be improved. Another boomerang that could end up coming back.
