Carlos Mazón will not be the head of the Generalitat any longer, but there will be no elections. Not for now, at least. With Vox’s help, the legislature will keep on with a “new president” in charge of the rebuilding. The leader of the Popular Party said this in a public appearance at the Palau de la Generalitat at nine this morning, Monday November 3rd. This came after talks with Alberto Núñez Feijóo on Sunday afternoon. He didn’t say if he would keep his seat in the Valencian Parliament, which would let him keep his parliamentary immunity and insulate him from possible prosecution in the DANA case.
Mazón admitted for the first time that he made “mistakes” during the DANA storm and said he would resign as president. He did this from the Gothic courtyard of the Palau de la Generalitat, not the Saló de Corts, which is used for big events like the institutional declaration less than a week ago to mark the anniversary of the DANA storm. His cabinet members stood by him until the very end. “I can’t take it anymore,” Mazón said, adding that he “would have resigned a long time ago” since “there have been unbearable moments, for me and especially for my family.”
“I know the next president will be able to continue the reconstruction, and maybe my leaving will help this tragedy be dealt with in light of this task,” Mazón said. He also asked the “active, current, and active parliamentary majority,” which is Vox, for their support in choosing a new president, whose name he did not give. “This majority is in charge of the rebuilding, and we can’t let anyone stop it. He said, “I ask this majority to be responsible and choose a new president of the Generalitat.”
He talked about his choice to depart in a “well-considered” way, saying that he had taken a “more personal look back” a year after the flood and was honest about his own “mistakes” in a way that wasn’t seen all year. He said, “Throughout all of this time, I have always held the same position: talking about the party’s internal affairs or my political future seemed silly in light of such a serious situation.” He also stressed that she was ready for the “political fallout” from the start.
Mazón has “clearly” pointed out his shortcomings, with “above all” his sticking to his timetable that day, even though he had defended it until only a few days before. He said, “I should have been politically aware, cancelled my plans, and gone to Utiel.” He also said that he was wrong not to petition the government for a national emergency declaration, as Núñez Feijóo had asked him to do: “He was right.”
Mazón, who seemed quite upset, also said that he shouldn’t have let “an image of the president as detached from the emergency” take hold. He kept saying that Aemet and the CHJ hadn’t given enough information about the Poyo ravine. He said he would have to live with these blunders “for the rest of his life,” but he also said that “none of them were politically motivated.”
He was especially hard on Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez at that point, saying that he had been plotting against him all year to bring him down. “I hope that when the noise dies down, people will be able to tell the difference between a man who made a mistake and a bad person.”
A weekend of thinking
Mazón made his choice after spending the weekend thinking it over with his trusted team in Alicante and negotiating with the PP headquarters in Madrid and Alberto Núñez Feijóo on Sunday. Around noon on Sunday, Cuca Gamarra, the PP’s Deputy Secretary for Institutional Regeneration, said that Feijóo, the party’s leader, would talk to Mazón during the day “about the political context of the Valencian Community.” As a result, everyone thought the decision would be made this weekend. However, it didn’t happen until the next day, when Maribel Vilaplana, the journalist with whom he had lunch on the fateful afternoon of October 29th between 3:00 and 7:00 PM, arrived at the Catarroja courthouse to give her statement in the judicial investigation into the DANA storm.
Author: Derek Appleton
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