23 days after the tragedy, Carlos Mazón closes the biggest Government crisis in the Valencian Community with the dismissal of Salomé Pradas, who until this Wednesday was the Minister of the Interior, Justice and responsible for Emergency policy, highly questioned after the management of the dana. Pradas was unaware that there was an instrument available to his team to send an alert to the population on October 29, when the virulent meteorological phenomenon devastated 78 municipalities in the province of Valencia, taking the lives of at least 218 people. Three weeks later, Mazón has chosen to divide the Pradas portfolio in order to try to lessen the criticism. Justice will be led by Nuria Martínez Sanchís, Doctor of Law from the Catholic University of Valencia, and Emergencies by Juan Carlos Valderrama, Doctor of Medicine and Surgery. The forecast is that all changes will be published by the end of the week.
The Valencian president clings to the changes in Government – which began on Sunday and have continued until this Wednesday – like a survival mast. He hopes to resist and relaunch his political career with the reconstruction of a devastated region. The Pradas departure, known this afternoon, had been taken since last week, as and. Mazón has delayed the appointments of his four new directors to give daily prominence to each of the new additions, according to sources from the Valencian Government.
The departure of Pradas from the Executive was a fact after admitting in an interview on À Punt, Valencian public television, that he was unaware that there was an instrument at his disposal to send an alert through mobile phones to all citizens to warn of the risk of flooding. . That system, Es-Alert, was active and this had been recognized by her predecessor in office, Elisa Núñez, from Vox.
Some changes that started on Sunday
The changes that Mazón initiated this Sunday were planned for last Friday, but another new dana that flew over Valencia last Wednesday postponed the appearance of the Valencian leader from Thursday to Friday, and forced him to postpone the decisions. . Four days ago, Vice President Susana Camarero assumed the role of Government Spokesperson. Camarero has been Mazón’s only lightning rod and shadow since the dana. His political figure gains internal weight and is now taking more flight after these first weeks of managing the catastrophe.
After Camarero, Mazón appointed Marian Cano this Monday as the new Minister of Industry of the Generalitat. Cano was the current president of the Valencian Association of Footwear Entrepreneurs (Avecal). He was also number 25 on the PP lists in the early elections to the European Parliament. The incorporation of Cano comes after the dismissal of Nuria Montes, at the head of Industry since 2023 and also very affected after the Dana tragedy.
of the victims of the dana, whom he asked to stay in their homes and not go to the Valencia Fair, enabled by the regional government as a morgue, although he later apologized. Criticism also intensified for not having called in a week an official from her department who had lost her husband and daughter, according to the woman herself on television.
After Montes came the surprise appointment that his team had been announcing, retired Army Lieutenant General Francisco José Gan Pampols. Pampols will assume the Vice Presidency for Reconstruction, the great bet of the leader of the Valencian PP to survive in politics until the 2027 elections, in principle.
With these changes and incorporations, Mazón now trusts his political future to the reconstruction of the dana, where the Generalitat has budgeted 200 million euros, while it has asked the Government of Pedro Sánchez for more than 31,000 million, a figure that exceeds the annual budget of the Valencian Community.
