Life is difficult right now for Carlos Mazón, the president of Spain’s Valencia region.
Take a recent week in his diary as an example. On the Tuesday, he had to hurry out of a pharmacy in the town of Paterna as hecklers gathered outside, shouting “murderer” and “liar” at him. Two days later, he could barely be heard as similar barracking drowned out a speech he was trying to give in Valencia’s Arts Palace building. On the Saturday, tens of thousands of people marched through Valencia city centre demanding his resignation – the fifth such protest in recent months.
The reason for this public fury is the perception that Mazón grossly mismanaged the flash floods which struck eastern Spain on October 29th of last year and killed 227 people, nearly all of them in the Valencia region.
Two facts have been particularly damning for Mazón. The first is that his administration did not issue an emergency alert to the phones of Valencians, providing advice and warning them to remain indoors, until just after 8pm on the day the floods struck, by which time the floodwater had already claimed most of its victims.
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The second cause of public outrage is the whereabouts of Mazón that day. Although the national weather agency had issued a red alert early on the morning of October 29th, Mazón was not in his office or even meeting officials as the disaster unfolded.
[ Valencia leader faces awkward questions over flood tragedyOpens in new window ]
After evading questions regarding his movements, it eventually emerged that he had spent nearly three hours lunching with a local journalist in a restaurant, during which time he does not appear to have been even remotely in control of the crisis.
In the immediate aftermath, Mazón said that he arrived at a meeting of an emergency co-ordination agency at around 7pm. Earlier this month, he changed his story to say that he had in fact arrived at just before 8.30pm. He then denied that he had offered two conflicting accounts.
Meanwhile, he has still not explained what he was doing for the three hours between lunch and his arrival at the emergency meeting.
As his baffling actions that day have been exposed, saying one thing and doing another has become Mazón’s defence mechanism.
“Showing our face to the public and offering answers is our obligation and our conviction,” he told the Valencia parliament, before blaming the Spanish government, the weather agency and the hydrographic agency for the tragedy. In January, in a display of tastelessness that shocked many Spaniards, he compared Valencia unfavourably to Gaza, complaining that his region had received no aid at all from the national government.
[ Spain floods: calls for resignation of Valencia leaderOpens in new window ]
Like much of what Mazón has said over the last four months, that has proved to be false. Aid has been deployed from Madrid, albeit not at the pace Valencians would like. Over that time, Mazón has faithfully followed the playbook of Donald Trump: not explaining, not apologising and countering criticism with inaccurate broadsides of his own.
This strategy has compounded the feeling among many Valencians that the state has abandoned them, as expressed in the slogan heard in the days that followed the floods: “Only the people save the people.”
A poll taken in December by the firm 40dB showed that 57 per cent of Valencians had lost confidence in public institutions since the tragedy (with another 21 per cent saying they had “never trusted” them previously).
Meanwhile, the vicious blame game between the regional and national governments has reinforced the sense that, in Spain, when the going gets tough, the political class gets bickering.
Mazón’s own conservative Popular Party (PP) has supported his attempts to dodge responsibility and point the finger at the central government. The PP national leadership has argued that Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sánchez should have declared an emergency on October 29th, thus wresting jurisdiction from Mazón – a view many Valencians share.
But a judge who is investigating possible negligence in the case has upended Mazón’s arguments, insisting that his regional government was responsible, that there was no shortage of information from other agencies and that the phone warning was erroneous and late.
Even his own party’s patience is wearing thin. Until now, Mazón has benefited from Spain’s lack of a coherent resignation culture, which often means scandal-ridden politicians can cling to their posts as long as they are not seen as electoral liabilities. PP national leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo has admitted that Mazón’s regional administration “was not up to” the challenge of managing the floods and yet he has not demanded his resignation.
Now, however, the PP is starting to express concern, not at the disgrace Mazón has brought on himself and his position but at internal polls that show the party losing ground in the Valencia region, undermining its hopes of returning to power nationwide.
A big factor preventing the PP from replacing Mazón is the far-right Vox, the third-strongest party in Spain, which could veto a possible substitute. Vox’s presence in Valencia’s political arena has another, arguably much more damaging, dimension: disrupting the science-based consensus regarding the October floods, it flatly denies that they are connected to climate change or that changing weather patterns are making such phenomena more common.
A few months before the disaster, a Vox councillor in Valencia city hall, José Gosálbez, described climate change as “an unproven hypothesis which the least-rigorous politicians have offered almost as an act of faith”.
Apparently swayed by Vox’s dangerous rhetoric on this issue, Mazón has eliminated several taxes aimed at capping greenhouse gases.
For now, he appears determined to ride out the heckles and boos that are the soundtrack to his public appearances. But, with a judicial probe under way and parliamentary investigations imminent, it is looking increasingly likely he will eventually be held to account. So much more than one man’s career depends on it.
Guy Hedgecoe is an Irish Times contributor based in Madrid
