Yesterday, in the face of the unleashed anger of the residents of Paiporta (Valencia), where more than fifty people have lost their lives due to the floods, the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, chose to leave the kings and the regional president just five minutes after starting his official visit to the epicenter of the disaster, the enormous devastation caused by the torrential storms last Tuesday. The kings and the regional president chose to stay and listen to the insults, complaints, and anger of a people who feel abandoned, because between the incompetence of some – the regional government – and the political tactics of others – the central government – the essential aid still has not arrived. As explained by one of the mobilized soldiers, finally, five days after the disaster, “we are capable of securing logistics in Afghanistan but we are not able to bring drinking water to the towns of Valencia.
As regional media explain in their editorials: “The President of the Government saw the opportunity to take down Carlos Mazón (the President of the Autonomous Community of Valencia, from the PP, after the recent regional elections) following his inadequate response to the disaster last Tuesday. But this political tactic, which we have become so accustomed to from both sides over the past decade, was this time causing deaths every hour that passed… Sánchez was in the front row to witness Mazón’s slow downfall, but instead, it was he who ended up being pointed out yesterday.”
“From the very beginning, and despite the disaster spreading across several autonomous communities, the Madrid Government has refused to take command of the operations and to immediately deploy the army and the state security forces to bring drinking water, food, and medicine to the residents of the affected towns. And with more than two hundred dead on the table, Sánchez’s response – ‘Let them ask us for what they need’ – (the Valencian government) would have been understandable for a disaster that occurred in North Africa or the Middle East… but the desperate residents are Valencians, Spanish citizens whom the central Government chose to leave in the hands of a regional government that was completely overwhelmed by the magnitude of the tragedy. A sad image of a President of the Government who flees and abandons the kings to avoid hearing the laments of an indignant people with his infamous attitude.
