Mazón does with the blackout what he didn't want to do with the DANA
BarcelonaThe blackout episode caused an unusual situation this Monday: one after another, the majority of regions governed by the People's Party (PP) requested the central government declare a State of Emergency Level 3 and placed the management of the emergency in the hands of the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska. Among the first to do so, in the early afternoon, were the Community of Madrid under Isabel Díaz Ayuso and the Andalusian government under Juanma Moreno. This is interesting because Ayuso and Moreno, who represent the two souls of the PP, are also leaders with a special political sense, and in the face of the general uncertainty, they decided to move quickly to avoid the specter of Mazón, that is, the risk of being singled out as responsible for a possible catastrophe. And this risk outweighed, according to their calculations, the contradiction of delegating powers to a government considered disastrous, incompetent, and even coup-mongering.
Ayuso and Moreno, however, had an advantage, since they knew that the party leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, would support them because he had already argued that the Valencian president should have done the same during the DANA. Mazón then resisted because he did not want to go through the ordeal of handing over Civil Protection powers to Madrid, which would have amounted to a kind of political confession of guilt in that context. The fact is that, in another of the multiple twists of the script that the Valencian president has starred in since that fateful October 29, this Monday at 9 p.m., when he was consulted by the Ministry of the Interior, Mazón compromised and also requested the declaration of emergency level 3. This Tuesday, seeing that it was an inequitable measure for emergency level 2, in which he maintains the powers.
Court statement
The fact is that Mazón did what he failed to do on April 28th due to a blackout on October 29th due to a flood that caused 227 deaths. This fact once again exposes him to the magnitude of both situations and will complicate his legal situation when it comes time for him to testify—he has not yet been charged, but the judge has already offered him the opportunity to appear as a witness several times—and the judge asks why he did it in one context and not the other. It's a similar case to the fact that, two days after the DANA (National Flood Protection Act), the Catalan government sent warning messages to the population of Castellón about the risk of flooding, demonstrating through the facts that it could have done exactly the same thing 48 hours earlier and many lives could have been saved.
The icing on the cake of Mazón's discredit in this crisis has been the distribution of a photograph on the same X profile of the president of the Generalitat of a monitoring meeting of the blackout in a dark office of the Palau de la Generalitat, wearing casual clothes and with only three other people (among them, the vice president Susana Camarero). An image that contrasts sharply with that of the crisis cabinets of other regional presidents or of Pedro Sánchez himself. The PSPV have also taken the opportunity to distribute an image of a crisis committee chaired by Ximo Puig, the president who traveled to the area during the DANA that devastated the Vega Baja in 2019 and activated the Cecopio 48 hours before.
