There is something that cannot be denied to Carlos Mazón. His ability to deny reality reaches levels rarely achieved in Spanish politics. Perhaps it is the only way he can continue to occupy the position of president of the Valencian government without completely falling apart. He is like a ‘worrier’ of the Generalitat: he came to office with an absolute majority thanks to the pact with Vox, but his gloomy management of the DANA emergency has turned him into a living dead. You just have to see how the PP mayors in the province talk about him – and include what they keep quiet about – and what the surveys that have appeared these days say.
The program ‘Salvados’ on La Sexta On Sunday, he offered a general portrait of what Mazón did and did not do on October 29 through the opinions of the mayors of the affected populations, both from the PSOE and the PP. The Popular Party has decided to link its destiny to that of Mazón. Núñez Feijóo thinks he has no other alternative. But when you ask the mayors what happened that day, their faces betray them. Sometimes, also his words. And even when someone, like the president of the Valencia Provincial Council, tries to defend him, Mazón himself does not take long to make it clear that he practically has nothing to blame himself for.
Vicente Mompó said that Mazón’s three-hour lunch with a journalist to offer her the position of president of the regional radio and television station “was a mistake,” for which he arrived several hours late to the Cecopi meeting, and that he is sure that the Valencian president thinks the same.
The president of the Provincial Council does not find out. He only had to wait a little more than twelve hours to see Mazón deny him: “It is impossible to be late to an organization that is neither convened nor chaired,” he said on Monday. Cecopi, the community’s emergency center, is the same organization that convened and chaired its meetings in the following days, including one Sunday. But on the 29th, the most important of all, it turns out that he had no obligation to be there or to respond to the alarming calls from the Valencian mayors.
Regarding the calls, Mompó opted for a heterodox solution, one that no public official would dare to admit in public. To explain why he did not remember if Mazón had called him that day – which is like saying that he did not want to admit that he had not called him – he stated that he could not check it on his cell phone because he has the habit of deleting the call log. “I am quite meticulous in these things, because, if not, it is impossible to work and that is how I see the work I have pending.” That is, its version is that it deletes those calls to which it does not have to respond.
For legal purposes, the trick can function as an alibi. Politically, he looked like someone accustomed to erasing evidence that could harm him.
Ricardo Gabaldón, mayor of the PP in Utiel, with 11,000 inhabitants, chose to take refuge in bad memory: “I don’t remember if President Mazón called me.” Gabaldón was the mayor who prevented the schools from opening that day early in the morning. It was a decision that quite possibly saved lives. At least, it helped keep 400 students out of danger. Utiel was the town that received the impact of the flood first. “I realized that it could become a catastrophe in the middle of the morning,” he said on the program.
Around two in the afternoon, the town began to flood. He told it in the 2:00 p.m. news program on A Punt: streets turned into rivers with a strong current, cars and containers dragged by the force of the water.
At that time, Mazón was meeting with the unions and employers to inform them of the future budgets. He seemed oblivious to the events that were taking place. An hour later, he began his three-hour meal. The Cecopi meeting was called at 3:00 p.m. to start at 5:00 p.m. They didn’t even have a television to watch the information A Punt offered. Late in the afternoon, at 7:03 p.m., the regional channel broadcast some terrifying images: the flood was so uncontrollable that The Picanya bridge was swept away. Mazón did not arrive at Cecopi until 7:30 p.m. Where he had no obligation to be, as he has not ceased to reiterate.
All mayors commented that the delay in decision-making was key. It always is in all emergencies. “I think that decisions should have been made much earlier given the seriousness of the situation,” said another PP mayor, Juan Ramón Adsuara, of Alfafar, with 21,000 inhabitants.
Regarding political responsibilities and measuring each and every one of his words, Gabaldón offered the most devastating message for Mazón’s interests. “Honestly, every time I think about it my hair stands on end, because what goes from making a decision to having made another, I wouldn’t be here now. “I couldn’t be there,” he said, referring to the very real possibility that more lives would have been lost if he had not ordered the closure of schools. That is a moral bar in which Mazón falls very short.
Surveys have certified the collapse of Mazón’s reputation. The one from El Mundo on Sunday foresees a drop of ten points in the PP in the community, a smaller one for the PSOE and big rises for Compromís and Vox. In the El País survey, the PP’s decline is limited to five points, which allows the right and the extreme right to retain their absolute majority. In both cases, the change is produced by the flight to abstention of a significant number of PP voters, embarrassed or enraged by the management of the emergency.
There are two years and five months left in the legislature. Mazón’s hope is that time and reconstruction will make his voters forget about the 222 deaths and four missing people on October 29, 2024.
As politics is unpredictable, perhaps the day will come when Mazón presents himself as the savior of Valencia and the architect of its reconstruction for which he has certainly allocated very little money from the community funds. For this to be possible, Valencians will have to forget that the high number of deaths could have been lower if an alert had been announced via mobile phones hours before 8:12 p.m., as the mayors, who already saw in the morning or at night, claim. lunchtime the dimensions of what was happening.
They should forget that Mazón said in Parliament that it was the fault of others, because he did not receive the necessary information to make other decisions, despite the fact that the Aemet had already announced a red alert early in the morning and that the Hydrographic Confederation of the Júcar updated its information every five minutes.
They must forget that very serious images had already appeared in the A Punt news and that the mayors were aware of the danger just by looking out of the windows, although in reality they did much more than that.
They should forget that the emergency telephone line collapsed and that the A Punt editorial team received hundreds of calls from people asking to be rescued from the roof of a truck or the roof of a house.
For now, Mazón says he is sure of his future: “I feel very defended by the Popular Party,” he said on December 6.
Correction: An early version of the article said that it was learned that the flood brought down the Picanya bridge around lunchtime. A Punt broadcast these images for the first time at 7:03 p.m.
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