The system has not failed, Mazón has failed

I told you this last Saturday and I wasn’t wrong. It is a universal law of Spanish politics: any great negligence on the part of the right is always followed by a campaign of mud and propaganda to evade responsibility. It happened with the Prestige, with the 11M, with the Yak 42, with the Madrid residences or with the Valencia metro accident. This is happening again with the DANA tragedy.

The victims don’t matter. The truth doesn’t matter. Everything is permitted, everything is permitted to win the small and miserable political battles of daily life. It’s not just obscene. It’s irresponsible too.

This week, in Europe, they got to know the People’s Party a little better. And to its leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo. Someone who – a week after Donald Trump’s victory – is capable of endangering the stability of Europe to save the irrecoverable: the reputation of Carlos Mazón.

I will summarize the scenario for you, to better understand it.

Mazón could resign. Of course yes. There is no shortage of reasons: firstly for pure personal ethics. Being able to look in the mirror. For a simple responsibility. It hasn’t and it won’t. He will know if it is worth it, what his conscience tells him and if he can sleep with it.

Mazón will not resign and no one in his party will ask him to. It’s not because they’re happy with it, they’re not. Not because they don’t know that he has no chance of resurrection. “Feijóo will support Mazón not to give victory to Sánchez,” the newspaper La Razón reported on the front page.

It’s that simple. It’s so hard. Feijóo does not want Mazón to resign because that would amount to accepting the reality that all fairly informed Valencians already know: that it is the negligent president of the Generalitat who has done extremely badly. That it was Mazón, and he alone, who maintained his agenda as if nothing had happened, after the AEMET red alert. It was Mazón who, on the very morning of the tragedy, criticized the University of Valencia for suspending classes. That it was Mazón who had disappeared for five hours that day; according to his latest explanation, which comes after several lies, during a three-hour lunch with a journalist. That his government was responsible for handling this emergency and that it is almost impossible to do worse.

So no, Mazón will not resign “so as not to give Sánchez a victory,” according to Feijóo’s worldview.

There is another reason: the power of the Generalitat. If Mazón resigns, his replacement will not be automatic. A new investiture must be voted on in the Valencian Parliament and the PP does not have a sufficient majority: it depends on Vox. If Mazón falls, Feijóo knows that it is possible that this political crisis could provoke early elections. And the PP is not ready today to participate in the elections in the Valencian Community, because of its incompetent management.

This is why Mazón did not resign. This is why he will not resign. And this is why the Popular Party has launched a new strategy of distraction. Let’s see if they get lucky and turn things around. Let’s see if they find another culprit, to reduce the pressure on Mazón’s head.

There is another universal law in Spanish politics: every time someone in the PP is wrong, someone else pays the price.

The first to have resigned from the Prestige was a PSOE deputy, for having joked about the tragedy. The first to resign from Gürtel was the socialist minister Mariano Fernández Bermejo (and shortly after, Baltasar Garzón, the first judge who investigated this corruption, fell). The first to resign from Ayuso’s brother’s commissions was Pablo Casado. And the one who has the most problems today with the justice system because of the fraud of Ayuso’s partner is the state attorney general.

The precedents are very clear. And it can happen again because it is the norm and not the exception. This is the usual tactic of the right. It should therefore not be excluded that the first major political victim of the Valencian tragedy was a person without any responsibility for the negligent management of the emergency: Vice President Teresa Ribera.

Ribera’s responsibility in this emergency? None. An example is what happened this week, with the second DANA in Andalusia, Catalonia and the Valencian Community. This time, the weather warnings were heeded. People were sent home and schools in at-risk areas were closed. Road traffic was prohibited. Alerts were sent to cell phones on time. And all this was done by the respective autonomous governments, and not by any ministry: because it is their responsibility and because it is also the autonomous governments that have the tools to exercise it.

If the first DANA in Valencia had been managed in the same way, if these measures had been taken at that time, how many victims would have been avoided?

Nobody remembers Teresa Ribera neither on the Tuesday of the tragedy, nor on Wednesday, nor on Thursday… It was only last weekend – shortly before the massive demonstration in Valencia against Mazón – that the PP began to throw mud at him.

This week, Ribera was interviewed at the European Parliament, ahead of her appointment as EU vice-president and commissioner. A sort of exam that all politicians take before joining the European Commission, the EU government. And taking advantage of this gorge, the PP fired all its artillery against it.

“A shit show,” defined this session in the international press. Amazed to see how the PP deputies tried to confuse Ribera.

The icing on this shit cake was put by Esteban González Pons, in one of the most cynical and base statements anyone can remember.

The leader of the European PP in the European Parliament, Manfred Weber, joined this dirty game of the PP. That he took the opportunity to launch an attack on his own party colleague, Ursula von der Leyen, less favorable than Weber to agreements with the far right.

The agreement that von der Leyen reached a few months ago with all EU governments and with the main groups in the European Parliament is the usual pact in Europe: a government led by the right – to which von der Leyen belongs – but supported by socialists and liberals. A European Commission with a conservative number 1, but with a socialist number 2: Teresa Ribera.

Pressure from Feijóo and Weber called this future commission into question. For now, his nomination and that of the other vice presidents have been postponed until November 20, when Ribera is due to appear before the Congress of Deputies.

The European PP has set a condition for Ribera to stop blocking her nomination: that she undertakes to resign if she is prosecuted by DANA of Valencia.

And it is important to know this information. Teresa Ribera is before the Supreme Court today, as vice-president of the Spanish government. But if she is appointed to the European Commission, she will lose her power: she can be prosecuted by any judge, any court that accepts the complaint that – with certainty – the ultra Clean Hands will present.

There is an important nuance in the request: the European PP speaks of her as being “pursued”, which is not the same thing as indicted. But even so, accepting this condition with the way some judges operate today in Spain is almost suicidal.

There is another problem for Ribera. If the European PP finally manages to impose an individual vote for each vice-presidency, the vote will be secret. And in the European Parliament, the right and the far right represent more than the left and the liberals. The risk that Ribera will thus become DANA’s first political victim is therefore quite high.

But the consequences for Europe are even greater than what the loss of such a position would mean for Spain. Bringing down Ribera also means dynamiting the pact that bordered the anti-European far right. All this, on the eve of Donald Trump coming to power in the United States. This is what the PP is putting in danger with this trick.

If the European Parliament vetoes Ribera as vice-president of the commission, Feijóo will be able to make Spain believe that it is Europe which condemns it: which considers that it is the main responsible, and not Carlos Mazón .

A Carlos Mazón who finally appeared this Friday before the Valencian courts. Where he openly lied, to avoid responsibility.

During this appearance, Mazón thanked the king, the Community of Madrid and even the leader José Andrés for their help. This is not the case with the Spanish government. Could it be that the Cercanías, the high speed or the AP7 took care of themselves.

But his most terrible sentence was when he made his big diagnosis: “The whole system has failed,” Mazón said. And no. That’s not what happened.

What failed on this tragic Tuesday, October 29, was not the system: it was the government of the Generalitat Valenciana. Starting with its president, irresponsibly missing at key times.

I’ll leave it here for today. Thanks for reading me. Thank you for your support to elDiario.es

A hug,

Ignacio School