While deputies, senators and ministers exchanged reproaches this Wednesday over the management of DANA, the mayor of Paterna and senator of the PSOE, Juan Antonio Sagredo, moved the Upper House by calling for unity with a broken voice and a stained Valencian flag. Pai spread mud on his hands.
“I hope they will join the cry of Valencia and give them what they ask of us, something as simple as changing confrontation for unity. Ladies and gentlemen, whatever you do, whatever I know, it is that I am returning to Valencia to rebuild ‘the greatest land in the world’,” declared the socialist senator in a brief speech from the speakers’ gallery.
His party colleagues stood up to applaud him and, from the ranks of the PP, Gerardo Camps, who had to go to the stage to launch the response, approached his seat to kiss him.
However, it is a flash of unity in a parliamentary day marked by mutual criticism and recriminations between parliamentary groups, engaged in the search for political culprits after the tragedy.
Sagredo took the floor to respond to Camps, who defended in plenary a motion demanding that the government review the emergency protocols, approve a “Valencia Plan” of reconstruction and that all the necessary resources be allocated to the affected areas. , without linking aid to the approval of the state budget for 2025. This would be an “extortion” of the parliamentary groups using the Valencians as a shield, warned the PP senator, who, in a speech Speech without reproaches major, he considered that the measures announced so far by the Government are “adequate”, although “insufficient”.
“For Poble Valencia, for Spain, only unity is worth it”
Sagredo took to the podium with the Valencian flag stained with mud and could not prevent his voice from breaking several times during his speech, loaded with the “tears and pain of those who lost everything” and full of the rage “of those who don’t understand why things don’t work.” “I speak to you with my heart in my hand, and also scratched, muddy and shrunk from having seen, smelled and felt so much tragedy,” said the senator, whose gesture garnered broad support from the chamber.
To reverse the “dystopian” landscape left by DANA, to restore dignity to the political class and regain the trust of society, the mayor of Paterna called for unity.
“Right now, Poble Valencia, Spain, only needs unity. Promises and good intentions are not worth it; They no longer serve them. They are tired of reproaches; They don’t want it. They only need facts and solutions. We are the constitutional body that represents the Spanish people, please let us never forget that,” he asked all senators.
The mayor was moved when remembering how a woman, Amparo, had offered him her house while they were helping to clear Aldaia: “We must give those who lost everything (…) a lesson in unity , common sense. .” Unity which, he continued, the Valencian socialists demonstrated by supporting “without reproach” the budgets of the Generalitat and the Foral Deputation of Valencia.
