Spain’s King and Queen were pelted with mud yesterday when they visited Paiporta, epicentre of the flood disaster zone in the Valencia region. Over two hundred people have died in the flooding, dozens of them in Paiporta; more are thought to be trapped and, by this time, surely dead in underground garages and car parks. Local people are furious that the authorities were slow to issue flood warnings when the rains came last Tuesday and then very poor at coordinating what has turned out to be a seriously under-resourced relief effort.
Locals seized the opportunity to vent their feelings of abandonment and desperation, chanting ‘Murderers’ and hurling slurry at the group
Many people are still without electricity, gas and water. Streets remain blocked by huge piles of cars. Some locals say that volunteers bringing in food and other supplies have been of more help so far than the police or army.
Protocol requires that the head of the regional government accompanies the monarch on official visits and Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s prime minister, who had not yet visited the disaster area, also decided to join Felipe and Letizia. Unsurprisingly, locals seized the opportunity to give vent to their feelings of abandonment and desperation, chanting ‘Murderers’ and hurling slurry at the group.
As the situation became increasingly volatile, Carlos Mazón, the regional leader, and Sánchez were quickly extricated by security officials. But King Felipe and Queen Letizia stayed for over an hour to listen, trying to console local people. When his escort attempted to shield Felipe with an umbrella, he insisted that they take it down so that he could meet people face to face. Letizia, pale, mud-spattered and apparently close to tears, could also be seen listening intently and nodding as locals shouted and screamed in despair.
Sánchez was surely right when he suggested that now is not the time to analyse negligence and allocate blame for the disaster, but that day of reckoning will soon come. Mazón is already being criticised for not declaring the flooding a ‘catastrophic emergency’ as soon as the scale of the disaster became apparent last week; that would have immediately transferred control of the situation to the central government.
In a country governed at five levels – local, provincial, regional, national and European – the distribution of powers in such extreme situations is, as Sánchez has intimated, a key problem. During the pandemic, the bureaucratic confusion caused by too much government also quickly became apparent. And problems are compounded when a left-wing central government has to deal with a right-wing regional administration: instead of working in harmony for the good of the people, politicians of both sides soon succumb to the temptation to score points.
Spain has an estimated 300-400,000 politicians; relative to population, that’s twice as many as France. The country’s politicians, while very numerous, are also seen as remote and unaccountable. And corruption is rife partly because there is so much administration. Both main parties, Sánchez’s left-wing PSOE, and regional leader Carlos Manzón’s right-wing Partido Popular, are constantly at loggerheads and mired in scandals.
In normal times, Spaniards are noticeably tolerant of their venal politicians’ ineptitude. But these are not normal times. Once the dead are counted and some semblance of normality has been restored, the political fallout will be huge. Any attempt to blame this disaster on climate change or to pass it off as a natural disaster which has to be accepted as ‘one of those things’ will be given short shrift by a furious populace. Heads will surely roll.
In the meantime, the monarchy’s popularity looks set to rise still further. Felipe, who’s 56, has done a good job during his first ten years on the throne. Taking after his mother rather than his back-slapping father, he’s seen as sober, hard-working and honest. Not surprisingly his June approval rating of 6.6 out of ten, according to IMPO Insights, is far higher than that of any of Spain’s leading politicians. The courage that he and Queen Letizia displayed yesterday will be remembered for a long time.
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