“Feijóo may be angry with Mazón, but he is not one of those who leave people lying around like a cigarette butt,” reflects an autonomous president of the PP about the decision of the popular leader to bring together all the barons of the PP with the president Valencian, who is in the midst of a political storm due to his management of the Dana catastrophe. In reality, it is up to Mazón to explain his agenda,” the PP parliamentary spokesperson, Miguel Tellado, said this Thursday, when asked about the absence of the president until seven in the afternoon at the emergency coordination meeting on the fateful Tuesday, October 29, when the storm that left more than two hundred dead broke out. Feijóo’s meeting this Friday with all the presidents, which was held by videoconference, represents the PP’s first collective support for the popular baron at the center of the controversy, although in the party some already assume that his political future is sentenced.
“If I don’t clarify the food, it’s fatal,” a popular baron judges about lunch until six in the afternoon in a well-known restaurant in the center of Valencia, without the team of the president has confirmed with which diners. “Those most symbolic and gruesome things are lethal in the media,” estimates this territorial leader of the PP.
“We all thought that Mazón should have said: I can’t do this alone; but we would also have expected that Sánchez would have taken a step forward,” reasons another PP president about the moments after the catastrophe. Although the main political problem for the Valencian Government is, above all, in the previous moments, due to the delay in sending the alert to the population, which was not disseminated until eight in the afternoon when at 7:37 in the morning the State Agency Meteorology had already issued a red warning for the storm in the province of Valencia. Until now, in a resounding and eloquent silence from both the leadership and the popular barons. Even Isabel Díaz Ayuso, who never shies away from any issue, has avoided commenting on the management of the dana. “I am not going to make statements. Can’t. I’m sorry. I only want the best for the people of Valencia,” the Madrid leader apologized.
Feijóo, who initially did travel to Valencia to support Mazón and tried there to hold Pedro Sánchez’s Government responsible for the tragedy, soon began to distance himself from a “forced separation” from the Valencian baron. PP leaders interpret that the PP leader knows that what happened in Valencia is a political “hole” into which he does not want to be dragged. Feijóo has had no qualms in defending, against Mazón’s criteria, the declaration of an emergency of national interest that would give command to the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, instead of the Generalitat, which has held it since the beginning of the crisis.
In the video conference with Mazón and the popular barons, the leader of the PP highlighted the “exemplary solidarity” of the popular communities with the Valencia tragedy. “No one has had to request it,” Feijóo remarked, after underlining, according to a brief statement from the PP. Feijóo has also recalled, according to the PP, that the Government did not want to declare a national emergency. “They have resigned from their responsibilities,” he complained after highlighting that the organizations that reported to the Generalitat depend on the Government, such as the Júcar Hydrographic Confederation and the AEMET. The brief statement from the PP does not say anything about Mazón’s management, nor to support it.
The PP has represented this Friday with the meeting a closing of ranks with the Valencian president, but in private the party is a hive of conversations about its political future, which some see as already very touched. Sources familiar with Feijóo’s hard core thesis maintain that the PP leader will not try to force Mazón’s departure in the short term, but they cannot guarantee it in the medium and long term. Although the PP cannot force Mazón, who is governing, to resign, the party could plunge into an internal war. Some popular leaders consider that the president Valencian should remodel his entire Government as soon as the worst of the emergency is over and leave it up in the air that he will run in the next elections, while they point to the mayor of Valencia, María José Catalá, as the only one who comes out “without blemish” of this crisis.
