“I congratulate the people of Gaza because yesterday we found out that they are going to receive more than 24 million euros in direct aid. I am very happy for the people of Gaza, I really am very happy. The Generalitat Valenciana is going to receive zero direct aid from the Sánchez Government.” The president of the Valencian Government, Carlos Mazón, perhaps the popular man who has the least to lose at the moment due to his delicate political situation after DANA, gave the starting signal this Thursday in the control session of the Corts, apparently a radical turn in the discourse of the main opposition party in its offensive to try to drag the Government of Pedro Sánchez into responsibility for managing the flood that has left 224 dead in the province of Valencia.
Minutes after these words, the New Generations ”. At 6:43 p.m., the official PP account of the same social network shared a tweet in which it contrasted the alleged absence of a request for aid from Pedro Sánchez’s executive to the European Union with the aid package planned for the Palestinian city with the following statement: “If you ask for help in Arabic, it arrives sooner.”
This same Friday, far from retracting, the spokesperson for the Valencia City Council, Juan Carlos Caballero, also from the PP, insisted that aid for Gaza “would be very good for those affected by DANA.”
To understand this radical turn initiated by Mazón, but supported by Génova, at least from its social networks, we must take into account, among others, two aspects: a very similar Vox speech delivered at the Madrid City Council and the surveys that reveal a fall of the popular ones against the extreme right.
On December 9, Vox criticized the granting of a direct aid subsidy to Chad of 111,300 euros and another of 83,553 euros to five Valencian municipalities and has already begun to fuel the discourse that more aid is approved for abroad, in this case for Africa, than for Valencia. In the midst of controversy over Mazón’s words and the PP’s tweets, the Vox group in Madrid recalled this fact on their networks last night at 11:54 p.m.
At the same time, a survey commissioned earlier this month by Laser and The Country confirmed that the PP had accumulated two consecutive months of decline in vote estimates, placing itself, for the first time, at the same percentage that it obtained in the elections of July 23, 2023, that is, 33% (in November the survey gave it two percentage points more), while Vox chained three consecutive months of rise.
Faced with this, it seems that the most radical populist policy has been imposed on the PP. And, beyond the fact that the comparison between Gaza and Valencia does not hold up due to the nature of both situations (an armed conflict in which 40,000 people have died in the face of a climate catastrophe), with the official data in hand the hoax is even larger in size.
The data: 1,468 million already subscribers
According to the last Government data published this FridayOf the aid package of 16,648 million euros approved by the central government for those affected by the flood, 1,468 million euros have been paid so far.
However, some PP leaders have already begun to discreetly distance themselves from this speech agitated by Mazón and the party’s social networks, which has been harshly criticized by the Left parties, claiming that it promotes hatred.
Specifically, the deputy secretary of culture and spokesperson for the PP, Borja Sémper, has tiptoed around the issue by stating on Telecinco’s ‘La Mirada Crítica’ about these messages, Sémper has indicated that “it is not necessary to enter into comparisons, of course , with no other place, nor with any other phenomenon that happens in the world” and that for him Twitter “is an absolutely toxic scenario” in which language moves away from what he considers politics “should be.”
The hoax about European aid: it began to be processed on November 4
This has not been the only chapter in the conservatives’ strategy to try to wear down the Government of Pedro Sánchez through the management of aid. Recently, it was the mayor of Valencia, María José Catalá, who, on a trip to Brussels, tried to convey the idea of an alleged delay by the Government in requesting aid from the European Solidarity Fund, since the deadline to request it ends on January 21 and the documentation has not yet been presented: “The first surprise and we have received it with great concern is that the Government of Spain has not yet officially requested the Solidarity Fund, more than two months after the DANA. We demand that you request it as soon as possible because the deadline ends on January 21 and we have already lost basic and very important time to obtain these funds that help reconstruction, families and municipalities,” he said.
The Ministry of Finance, as elDiario.es reported, showed the official letter through which the Government informed the European Commission on November 4 of all the aid for which it was going to opt, including those from the Solidarity Fund. From that formal communication, as explained by the Treasury, the deadline began to collect all the documentation to justify the amount of the funds requested, something that is always done to speed up the deadline and that, as already said, will be done in time and manner between Monday and Tuesday of next week
Gan Pampols, Mazón’s vice president who debunks his hoaxes
In the midst of this controversy, the vice president of the Valencian Government signed by Mazón, Francisco José Gan Pampols, burst in, exercising responsibility, distancing himself from the criticism of the PP and endorsing the explanations of the Ministry of Finance: “All countries tend to exhaust the deadlines because as the deadline runs out, the level of detail reached regarding the assessment of the damage is better,” he said.
This attitude, that of moving away from hoaxes, earned him the reproach of Vox this Thursday in the control session of the Corts. The spokesperson for the far-right party, José María Llanos, put his sights on the retired lieutenant general, who he wondered if he “wouldn’t be better off keeping quiet.” Llanos also accused him of “playing into the hands” of the Government.
It is not the first time that Gan Pampols distances itself from the PP. In one of his first statements as vice president, he assured about the response of the Valencian Government on October 29, the day of the tragedy, that the emergency and alert system failed: “Lives could have been saved,” he assured.
Furthermore, while the PP accused the Júcar Hydrographic Confederation (CHJ) of opacity due to the silence of its president, Miguel Polo, since the day of DANA, Gan Pampols met with Polo himself in a meeting that was described as “cordial”. An organization can hardly be accused of hiding something after meeting with a vice president of the Valencian Government: a new balloon punctured by the retired lieutenant general.
Nor did Gan Pampols hesitate to argue against one of the star decrees approved by the Mazón Government to speed up reconstruction by making urban planning legislation more flexible in the affected areas. Gan Pampols, specifically appointed to direct the reconstruction, argued that his reports were mandatory, although not binding, before approving any urban planning procedure, an argument that was accepted.
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