“Politics in Spain has been reduced to division, confrontation and partisan competition. “We will do everything on our part so that politics lives up to the circumstances and the people.” This is how the leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, expressed himself last Monday in an appearance without questions in which he called for a “useful, humble, self-critical, collaborative and sincere policy.” This Thursday, his parliamentary spokesman and right-hand man, Miguel Tellado, has accused the Government of Pedro Sánchez of acting in “bad faith” during the DANA crisis that has caused around 200 deaths, while he has justified that the president of the Generalitat , Carlos Mazón, was absent from crisis meetings for hours: “He was perfectly informed and communicated.”
Tellado has appeared in Congress after the meeting of the Board of Spokespersons to join the anti-political discourse that permeates far-right networks in the last week. “This is not the time for politicians,” he said, with his decades of public office behind him. “This is not the time for partisan fighting. It is the moment for the victims, for the affected people,” he added.
Immediately afterwards, the PP spokesperson has deployed a whole battery of direct accusations against the management of the central government, while he has defended without fissures the decisions taken by the Valencian Generalitat on Tuesday, October 29, when the torrential rains caused the most serious floods. of the recent history of Spain.
Tellado has taken advantage of 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 catastrophe of the seriousness of the situation. And I would like to know why Pedro Sánchez, the president of the Government, did not act with that information that National Security sent to La Moncloa. It is extremely serious. Perhaps Pedro Sánchez did not act because he was in India. “We don’t know.”
The information from Abc begins like this: “The Department of Homeland Security considered early on Tuesday the 29th – almost twelve hours before DANA began to cause flooding – that the weather situation was adverse enough to issue a warning to the view of the information already handled at that 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 the Aemet and other State organizations available early Tuesday, the PP believes that the central government should have anticipated it. But it is that same information that, according to Tellado himself, was insufficient and, for this reason, Mazón did not order the citizen alert to be sent until after eight in the afternoon, when the floods were already flooding a good part of the province.
An alert that, according to the media cited by Tellado, was on the National Security website and that should have been enough for the Government to declare a national emergency and assume command: “The Government was able to declare a national emergency and get involved from the first moment and He didn’t do it. And I believe that it is not that the Government has acted badly, it is that I believe that the government has acted in bad faith.”
Mazón never wanted the Government to assume command and no one from the PP has asked him for public explanations for this, although some barons have said that, indeed, the catastrophe required the Government to take control that the Generalitat did not let go.
Tellado has thus recovered the strategy deployed by Mazón from the first moment and has pointed out to Aemet itself and to the Hydrological Confederation for not having given the appropriate information to the Valencian Generalitat, which would have caused the regional authorities not to make the appropriate decisions. Feijóo himself questioned the state agency’s data.
The PP spokesperson has asked that the Government explain “what information it handled through its sources of information and what information it conveyed to the Government of the Generalitat Valenciana in the hours before the catastrophe, also including how the flow of information, for example, from the Júcar Hydrographic Confederation.”
The Júcar Hydrographic Confederation warned at 6:42 p.m. of floods of more than 1,000 cubic meters of water per second, but the Generalitat did not warn until 8:12 p.m. Tellado has demanded that Sánchez suspend his international agenda next week to explain in Congress “what the Júcar Hydrographic Confederation did or did not do.”
Defense of Mazon
Tellado has alternated demanding accountability from the Government with a closed defense of the actions of the Valencian Government chaired by Carlos Mazón from Alicante. “I see the president of the Generalitat Valenciana every day on the ground, caring for people and solving problems and fulfilling his obligations,” he said.
The PP spokesperson has relativized the hours of Mazón’s absence at the crisis committee meeting because, he said, “members of the Government of the Generalitat were present who kept President Mazón up to date with everything that was happening throughout the the afternoon and that he was perfectly informed and in communication with the Crisis Committee.”
Tellado tiptoed around Mazón’s absence on Tuesday the 29th, which he first justified in a “private dinner” that, a week later, he turned into a “working lunch.” “It is up to Mazón to explain the agenda for that day,” he said.
“That day,” in the words of Tellado, 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 that started at 5:00 p.m., although “he was informed ”, according to his team. He arrived more than two and a half hours late and “the topics discussed had to be explained to him.” The citizen alert did not arrive until 8:12 p.m.
But Tellado has placed the responsibility on state agencies: “What the Hydrographic Confederation has to explain to us is why it was not notified until shortly before seven in the afternoon.”
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