“Politics in Spain has been reduced to division, confrontation and partisan competition. “We will do everything in our power to ensure that politics responds to the circumstances and the people.” This is how the leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, expressed himself last Monday during an appearance without questions during which he called for a “useful, humble, self-critical, collaborative and sincere policy”. This Thursday, his parliamentary spokesperson and right-hand man, Miguel Tellado, accused the government of Pedro Sánchez of acting in “bad faith” during the DANA crisis which caused around 200 deaths, while justifying that the president of the Generalitat, Carlos Mazón, was absent from crisis meetings for hours: “He was perfectly informed and communicated. »
Tellado appeared in Congress after the Council of Spokespersons meeting to join the anti-politics discourse permeating far-right networks last week. “This is not the time for politicians,” he said, with decades of public office behind him. “This is not the time for partisan fighting. This is the time for the victims, for the people affected,” he added.
Immediately afterwards, the spokesperson of the PP deployed a whole battery of direct accusations against the leadership of the central government, while defending without cracks the decisions taken by the Valencian Generalitat on Tuesday, October 29, when the torrential rains caused the floods the most serious. . of the recent history of Spain.
Tellado took advantage of the information published by Abc, and which is based on an alert from Aemet, to ensure that “National Security warned the president of the government, Moncloa, 12 hours before the disaster, of the seriousness of the situation. And I would like to know why Pedro Sánchez, the president of the government, did not act on this information that National Security sent to La Moncloa. This is extremely serious. Perhaps Pedro Sánchez did not act because he was in India. “We don’t know.”
The ABC report begins: “The Department of Homeland Security considered early Tuesday the 29th – almost twelve hours before DANA began causing flooding – that the weather situation was sufficiently unfavorable to issue a warning based on the information already processed. at the time by the State Meteorological Agency (Aemet) and the General Directorate of Civil Protection (Ministry of the Interior).
That is to say, with the information provided by Aemet and other state bodies available on Tuesday morning, the PP believes that the central government should have anticipated it. But it is this same information that, according to Tellado himself, was insufficient and, for this reason, Mazón only ordered the citizen alert to be sent after eight in the afternoon, when floods were already inundating a good part of the province. .
An alert which, according to the media cited by Tellado, appeared on the National Security website and which should have been enough for the government to declare a national emergency and take command: “The government was able to declare a national emergency and imply from the first moment and He did not do it. And I believe it’s not that the government acted in bad faith, it’s that I believe the government acted in bad faith.”
Mazón never wanted the government to take command and no member of the PP asked him for a public explanation on this matter, although some barons declared that indeed the catastrophe demanded that the government take control and that the Generalitat has not let go.
Tellado thus recovered the strategy deployed by Mazón from the first moment and pointed the finger at Aemet itself and the Hydrological Confederation for not having provided the appropriate information to the Valencian Generalitat, which would have led the regional authorities not to take appropriate decisions. . Feijóo himself questioned the state agency’s data.
The PP spokesperson asked the government to explain “what information it processed through its information sources and what information it transmitted to the Government of the Generalitat Valenciana in the hours preceding the disaster, also including how the information flow, for example, from the Hydrographic Confederation of Júcar.
The Hydrographic Confederation of Júcar warned at 6:42 p.m. of flooding of more than 1,000 cubic meters of water per second, but the Generalitat did not alert until 8:12 p.m. Tellado requested that Sánchez suspend his international agenda next week to explain to Congress “what the Hydrographic Confederation of Júcar has done or not done.”
Defense of Mazon
Tellado alternated demanding accountability from the government with a closed defense of the actions of the Valencian government chaired by Carlos Mazón of Alicante. “I see the president of the Generalitat Valenciana every day on the ground, taking care of people, solving problems and fulfilling his obligations,” he said.
The PP spokesperson put into perspective the hours of Mazón’s absence from the crisis committee meeting because, he said, “there were members of the Generalitat government present who kept President Mazón informed of everything that was happening throughout the afternoon and that he was fully informed and in communication with the crisis committee.
Tellado tiptoed about Mazón’s absence on Tuesday the 29th, which he initially justified with a “private dinner” that he transformed a week later into a “working lunch.” “It’s up to Mazón to explain the agenda for this day,” he said.
“That day”, in Tellado’s words, the president of the Generalitat was at a private lunch after an event with unions and employers and did not follow by videoconference the key meeting of the Operational Coordination Center which started at 5:00 p.m., even if “he was informed”, according to his team. He arrived more than two and a half hours late and “we had to explain to him the subjects discussed”. The citizen alert did not arrive until 8:12 p.m.
But Tellado placed the blame on state agencies: “What the Hydrographic Confederation has to explain to us is why it was only notified shortly before seven in the afternoon.”
