On Tuesday, there was a general policy debate in the Valencian Parliament, the first since the DANA (Dana), which will be eleven months old next Monday. For much of those eleven months, it seemed that the political career of the President of the Generalitat Valenciana, Carlos Mazón, was doomed, following the inept, mendacious, and disrespectful handling of that catastrophe by him and the Council he presides over. The toll, as is known, is 228 victims, a good portion of whom could have been saved if everyone had heeded their responsibilities on October 29th. To this day, there has been no way to clarify Mazón's whereabouts during the nearly two hours that elapsed between leaving lunch and the moment he appeared at the Cecopio (Cecopio). The opacity remains total, and the administration's treatment of the victims' families has ranged from contempt and insults to attempts at botched manipulation.
Mazón's political life was saved, as they say, by the bell, thanks to a plot twist in which Vox approved his budget in exchange for fully embracing his far-right neo-Francoist program, something that Mazón has done—it must be said—without any effort. Within this program, hatred of the Catalan language plays a fundamental role, this poisonous antiquity that Spanish nationalism has dragged along since the 18th century. In 2025, in the 21st century, hatred of Catalan has not only not dissolved as the ideological coprolite that it is, but has become entrenched in the form of an obsession, aligned with the rest of the extensive catalog of hatreds preached by the far right. Mazón's government has already worked hard, through the work of social tension and the siege against public schools carried out by the Minister of Education, José Antonio Rovira, a close friend of Mazón and a true hooligan of the most thunderous and rancid Spanishness.
However, the new commitments to Vox require redoubling the intensity of the attacks against Valencian (i.e., Catalan), and on Tuesday, in a parliamentary session from which he could have been harmed, Mazón found it was time to pull this trump card. He announced a new attack against the Valencian Academy of Language (the official authority on linguistic matters in the Valencian Country, defender of philological rigor and the unity of the Catalan language): they have already cut its budget allocation in half, and now they intend to change its name to become an academy for a supposed language. They don't have a sufficient majority to do so, but the smoke bomb had already been launched and it had its effect.
Accusing others of fueling linguistic conflict while they themselves ignite and exacerbate it is also a very old practice of the nationalist right, such as that represented by Mazón in the Valencian Community or Prohens in the Balearic Islands. At the same time, these are the first stages of another cultural war, that of linguistic secessionism, which they are prepared to fight to the bitter end.
