New Valencian president, but Mazón's own government

Perhaps it was too optimistic to think that the new Valencian president, Juanfran Pérez Llorca, would clean house in the government responsible for the disastrous handling of the DANA storm after Carlos Mazón's resignation, as this has not been the case. Llorca was, after all, Mazón's right-hand man and his spokesperson in the Valencian Parliament. The new president is opting for continuity and keeping most of Mazón's cabinet, but he has introduced some surgical changes with a clear political agenda. In this regard, two of the ministers most directly implicated in the DANA storm's management, Vice President Susana Camarero and Education Minister José Antonio Rovira, have either lost responsibilities or been transferred to other departments. Camarero will no longer be the government spokesperson, a gesture aimed at the victims, and she will also not manage the reconstruction efforts, which will be handled by a newly created position. Camarero also loses her responsibilities in Social Services, which were in charge of alerting the elderly population and nursing homes. Let's also remember that Camarero has been the face defending Mazón every week for the past year and that she became sadly famous because on the day of the DANA storm, she went to an awards gala while l'Horta Sud was flooding and sent the following message to the number two in Emergency Services when he informed her of what was happening:Jope, if you need anything, let us know."However, she will continue as vice president and with her responsibilities for Housing.

For his part, Rovira completely disengaged on the day of the DANA storm and gave no order to suspend classes. Moreover, that day he went to Alicante for a family lunch. [He] from a high school in Cheste—which suspended classes and thus saved its students—from his own death because he then decided to return to Valencia and was caught in the flood, abandoning Education and will become the new Minister of Economy and Finance."

With this move, Lorca seeks to pacify the open conflict that Rovira had with the educational community, especially due to his obsession with the Valencian language. The new Minister of Education will be María del Carmen Ortí Ferre, with a more technical than political profile. The new president has also reserved for himself the powers in Language Policy, and his intention, according to him, is to depoliticize the issue of language.

However, these two gestures do not conceal two particularly serious issues: first, that this is a government bearing the stamp of the previous president, where eight of his ministers remain – only the former Ciudadanos member Ruth Merino is leaving – and three new ones are joining; and second, that it is an executive branch that is completely dependent on the previous president. It's difficult for the victims of the DANA storm to accept seeing the same faces in the official photo of the Valencian Government as on that fateful October 29th, and even more difficult for Alberto Núñez Feijóo, who calls for elections in Spain every day, to justify why there was no vote in the Valencian Community after one of its worst catastrophes.