Next week the first Plenary Session will be held in Congress on DANA. In principle, officially, all parties demand unity and that the fight be avoided so that it only serves to give an image of support to the victims of the flood, after they have felt abandoned for a week precisely for reasons of political competition. Or incompetence, depending on how you want to read it.
However, the two administrations that are under the microscope, the central government and the Generalitat, have agreed to set up two work teams, which will “pull” the ministries and departments that may have useful information to filter information that attacks to the adversary and derive political responsibilities on him. The idea comes from the cabinets of Pedro Sánchez and Carlos Mazón, in a dog-eat-dog competition to see who defeats the opponent first at the expense of more than 200 dead and almost 100 missing. By the way, outside of that political mud that court advisors to the head of the central Executive and the president of the Generalitat are spreading, the emergency services already assume that, not even with the two minehunting ships that have arrived in Valencia to search the coast, there is chances, except very slim, of recovering the bodies of most of the people who remain missing since the fateful night of Tuesday last week.
The skein of civil protection protocols makes it easier for politicians to continue in the coming days filling the pot with mud to throw it at the opponent. Moncloa believes that it has before it the possibility of turning the tragedy into a breath of fresh air for Pedro Sánchez at the expense of the differences between Alberto Núñez Feijóo and Carlos Mazón, and of the errors, which he did make, of the president of the Generalitat. Moncloa ignores his abandonment of responsibilities, which he also had and has, to target only Mazón and Feijóo.
In Moncloa’s strategy, they first circulated the message that they were ultras, and not citizens torn by the tragedy, who attacked the president during his visit to Paiporta. Equally condemnable is the violence, whether by some or others, although Sánchez’s story requires the component of the extreme right. At the moment, the police investigation is open and has not concluded in that direction.
Moncloa’s next step has been to create the environment for Sánchez to appear as the clean leader who manages to unite all parties around him, including the PP and despite Mazón’s failures. And meanwhile, undercover, papers are already flying to build a dossier that will weaken Mazón so much that it will put him on the brink of resignation. And, if not, strengthen Vox so that the PP autonomous government becomes very destabilized.
The Generalitat is in the same war with the review of infrastructure works planned by the central Government and not executed. And with the leak of communications that would prove that Madrid was not notified in time of what was coming to them. It is difficult for the politicians who are managing it to emerge well from a crisis like this, but they have already put all their resources into the fight, and with the utmost diligence, this time yes, just in case. In the middle is Feijóo, with his more state-like speech and appeal to that declaration of the national emergency that would have helped manage the catastrophe more effectively.
On the other hand, the use of the Military Emergency Unit (UME) and the closeness of its chief, Lieutenant General Javier Marcos, to the Minister of Defense, Margarita Robles, is raising suspicions within the two armies and the Navy. The general’s statements give rise to a political reading within the management of a catastrophe that if there is something wrong, precisely, it is an excess of political calculation.
The head of the UME exposed the Valencian president on Monday by ensuring that they did not act before because they needed a “green light” from the emergency management (Mazón), but in the Armed Forces, according to their neutrality protocols, they believe that there was an excess, even if he was right, and that in some way he would have broken the most basic rules.
Furthermore, within the Armed Forces there is also latent unrest, always under the radar, over how the mobilization of uniformed personnel has been managed, since they believe that political decisions harm the image of the military. They are right that the order regarding the timing of the deployment was political, and that it inevitably affects their image at a time when people needed them to be by their side more than ever, as has already happened in previous tragedies, such as the pandemic. or the La Palma volcano.
And it is that in the first days of operation to deal with the consequences of the floods, basically for those political reasons, there were hardly any soldiers in the streets of the most affected towns because Moncloa and Generalitat were entangled in seeing who would move a step. before the other and who came out better placed in the public opinion.
In the Armed Forces, there is concern that even the prestige of the military is overlooked for political interest. And there are many who have been raising it these days, most of them anonymously, because they want to avoid any type of retaliation within the political neutrality that is assumed of them, although they are not oblivious to the reality that surrounds them. «They are using us as a political weapon when all we do is serve and help. We don’t care which politician gives us the order nor do we value it, we simply act,” one of the many soldiers deployed to the “ground zero” of the catastrophe tells this newspaper. Others go further and criticize that “the war between parties that is seen daily in Congress has moved to a situation like this. We wanted to leave as soon as possible and we were prepared for it, but it seems that they did not want to start with more force due to some type of interest. Something this has caused many citizens to “see us as the enemy, when we are the complete opposite and we have demonstrated it and we are demonstrating it.”
In fact, associations such as the Spanish Troop and Marine Corps (ATME) have stressed this point these days to explain it: «The Armed Forces are a hierarchical institution that responds to orders and requests for help from civil authorities in this type. of disasters, they do not act motu proprio.