“I don’t have any information from the central government. Not at all, none. In a national emergency, in addition to humanity and sensitivity, collaboration is needed.” The leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, went to Valencia this 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 catastrophe 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 are going to continue with them.” The difference between the words of one and the other is that which goes from the role of regional ruler, with responsibility and competence in what happened, to that of the parachutist who comes to try to obtain political gain from a misfortune. A behavior that Feijóo has become a trademark of the house since his arrival to the political front line, almost two decades ago.
“With us, no people 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 in A Coruña. In an event in which the then president of the PP, Mariano Rajoy, openly called for the vote, Feijóo attacked the bipartite government for its management of the wave of fires the previous summer, the one in which he himself was photographed wielding an embers toward some embers. garden hose dressed in shirt, shoes and jeans.
That wave burned, according to the Xunta, 77,000 hectares between August 3 and 15, although the popular ones, using supposed NASA data, multiplied that figure to 175,000 before any official count was known. On the second day of fires, on Friday, August 4, two women – mother and daughter – suffered a small accident in their car, which was surrounded by flames in Cotobade (Pontevedra, today Cerdedo-Cotobade). Both died asphyxiated by smoke. The same thing happened days later to a 70-year-old man who was fighting another outbreak in Campo Lameiro. The disastrous poker came to a close with another seventy-year-old who died 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 house from a fire.
The phrase he pronounced in Carballo returned like a boomerang to Feijóo three years later. On August 12, 2010, with the PP back in the Xunta, two brigade members, aged 27 and 35, died in a forest fire in Fornelos de Montes. And that time there was responsibility of the autonomous government. This was what the Superior Court of Xustiza of Galicia ruled in 2017, considering that the “poor functioning of public services” influenced the fatal outcome. That same fall, by the way, 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 words.
Since his victory at the polls – and, especially, since the death of the brigade members -, Feijóo chose to move the focus away from the work of the administration and put it on the “criminal activity” of the arsonists. The ecological catastrophes became a problem of public order, of “organized terrorist plots” against which Zapatero’s central government or Rubalcaba’s Ministry of the Interior did nothing. Once again the ball is in Madrid’s court, as he tried to do this Thursday from Valencia, by supporting Mazón himself who would later express his gratitude to Sánchez, and defending the role of the regional presidents against the central executive.
“They are the ones who have carried the weight of this national emergency” and have been “a pineapple”, an “example of collaboration and solidarity.” Feijóo could not resist talking 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, citizens ask him for additional responsibility.” For this reason, in the face of an action by the Generalitat of which he says he is “proud”, he has only cast doubts on the warnings issued by two state entities: AEMET and the Hydrographic Confederation: “No one can make decisions based on information that can be exact, which may be inexact or which may be improved.” Another boomerang that may end up coming back.
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