BarcelonaTo understand the resistance of the Valencian right to confine the population we have to go back to the pandemic, when all of Spain discovered a figure called Isabel Díaz Ayuso. The Madrid president turned a health policy such as the confinement of the population and the closure of certain economic activities such as catering into an ideological banner of the cultural war between left and right. Confining became something of the left, a communist measure that threatened people’s freedom. That’s why Madrid kept the bars open longer and the virus spread throughout the Peninsula. Vox even brought the first state of alarm to the Constitutional Court, which decreed, with its conservative majority, that a state of emergency should have been declared to confine the population. What is important here is what remained in public opinion: the confinement was illegal.
In this sense, the Valencian PP is more Ayusista than Feijoista, it is strongly ideological and lives fully within the media bubble that Pedro Sánchez defines as the fathosphere. It is not for nothing that they were the first to agree with Vox, and the Valencian Country was the place where the relationship between the PP and the extreme right was more fluid. The harmony between Mazón and his vice-president, extorero Vicente Barrera, was total.
The 2023 alert
Let’s now move to another date: the beginning of September 2023. The State Meteorological Agency, Aemet, issues an alert of torrential rain due to a DANA in Madrid and other parts of Spain. The mayor, José Luis Martínez-Almeida, asked the population to stay at home by sending an alert message to mobile phones and closed museums and municipal spaces. Finally, the rains did not affect the capital as much as some municipalities of Toledo, 40 km away, where 200 liters per square meter fell. The entire PP, however, charged in a storm against Aemet for being alarmist and for not fine-tuning his forecasts enough, including Almeida. The most forceful, however, was the Andalusian president, Juanma Moreno, who said that “if a public body warns of “extreme danger” it must be very sure, because this has social and economic consequences.”
Therefore, confining is not only left-wing, it is uneconomic. These two factors, the ideological, on the one hand, and the fear of taking measures with an economic impact, on the other, may have induced Mazón to commit a monumental error that has so far caused more than a hundred deaths . If only the alarm had been sent two hours earlier, at 6 p.m., many lives could have been saved. But in the case of Utiel, the population should have been warned much earlier. The fact that in the districts of Castelló the same mistake has been repeated and the confinement order has been given at 11.50 a.m. when all the children were already at school and the workers at the factories, shows that the ideological resistance has already resulted in serious neglect. Because confining the population is not left-wing or right-wing, it is simply common sense when there is a risk to human lives. And competence in civil protection is exclusive to the Generalitat Valenciana according to the Statute (art. 49.3).
The attempt now to shift the responsibility towards the Spanish government, as Alberto Núñez Feijóo intends to do, is nothing more than a desperate maneuver to save the soldier Mazón, who is already politically dead. And be careful, because Feijóo can come out contaminated.
