Carlos Mazón will continue to lead the Valencian Community as acting president despite having announced his resignation this Monday, it is not known who will be the person who will replace him at the head of the Consell and it cannot even be ruled out that the regional elections will be brought forward, if the necessary votes for the investiture are not obtained. The leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, has not managed to close the open crisis both in the Valencian Consell and in his own party due to the absences and confusing testimonies of Mazón on the day of the dana of October 29, 2024, when 229 drowned people died in that territory alone.
Over the weekend, Feijóo and Mazón spoke by phone on several occasions, as they acknowledged this Monday at 13 Génova Street in Madrid, the PP’s headquarters. But after those conversations the state president only managed a kind of escape forward: that Mazón announced his resignation until Les Corts elect his successor. Although Feijóo’s leadership hoped to be able to settle the departure of the Valencian baron on the same Sunday, the still president finally appeared before the media this Monday, at 9:00 a.m. He did not engage in self-criticism at all, he gave several false information and even launched harsh accusations against the Government of Pedro Sánchez. And far from guaranteeing the ability to protect the succession, the PP leadership agreed to entrust itself to Vox, the force on which a future investiture of the new president depends and with which the Popular Party has been in a tough fight for the same electorate for months.
“I address that parliamentary majority that is alive, current and underway. I appeal to that majority to elect a new president of the Generalitat,” Mazón said in his appearance, addressing Vox, but without mentioning it. Minutes later, and without mentioning the extreme right either, Feijóo asked “the parties” that support his party in the Valencian government to “facilitate the election of a new president” as soon as possible. The leader of Vox, Santiago Abascal, already knew that Mazón was going to announce his resignation this Monday, as he revealed throughout the morning in statements to the press in Plasencia, Cáceres.
According to the PP, the two right-wing forces keep the channels of dialogue open to try to find Mazón’s successor as soon as possible. Vox says, however, that there is no conversation. But everything will depend on the extreme right, with which the PP will have to agree not only on a name but also on a political project that motivates the extreme right to support a new investiture instead of letting the Consell fall and elections being called. All of this at a time when Abascal’s party is experiencing unstoppable growth in the Valencian Community after months of wear and tear on the part of the popular party and when a new electoral cycle begins on December 21 – with the regional elections of Extremadura – in which both forces will compete for the same right-wing voters.
The meeting on the 7th
The events have not occurred entirely as expected by Feijóo’s management, who tried to pilot Mazón’s last moments to maintain control of the match in Valencia. The Valencian president’s team had been threatening for days with an electoral call if Génova did not give in and accepted that his replacement would be his number two in the party, Juanfran Pérez Llorca. The favorite of the national leadership was María José Catalá, but they were also unable to place her at the head of the Consell, since she wants to focus on the Valencia City Council.
Feijóo and Mazón had scheduled an in-person meeting for this same Friday, November 7, but everything was precipitated by the state funeral of the Dana that took place last Wednesday in Valencia, where the relatives of the victims did not spare the Valencian president in insults and reproaches. The version of the PP leadership is that at that ceremony both leaders spoke, and Mazón told his top boss in the party that he could not take it anymore and that he intended to leave.
The weekend conversations focused, therefore, on specifying how the departure was going to take place, without both leaders reaching an agreement on the replacement, or on Mazón’s definitive departure from politics. Even after being replaced, the intention of the still president is to continue as a deputy in Les Corts to maintain his capacity and that he can only be investigated by the Superior Court of Justice of the Valencian Community (TSJPV). That is to say, even outside the Consell, Valencians will continue to see Mazón in their regional parliament, in principle in total harmony with the main group in the chamber, the PP.
In this scenario, Feijóo held a National Executive Committee of the PP this Monday, the body that brings together the party leadership with its top regional leaders. The topic of the day was Mazón’s resignation, but in his public intervention Feijóo only dedicated a few minutes to talking about the biggest internal crisis that the team he leads has been experiencing for months. Almost at the end of his closed and televised intervention by the PP, the president of the popular parties considered that Mazón’s had been “a correct decision.” Feijóo went so far as to praise the Valencian president, “a colleague who has recognized mistakes, but who has also suffered a political and personal hunt.” “He is not a murderer,” emphasized the PP leader, who considered that the president has already assumed his “mistakes.”
Abascal charges against Genoa
Génova 13 now depends on Vox to fulfill one of its obsessions: maintaining the government of the Valencian Community. Along with that of Andalusia and Madrid, the Valencian is the most important executive that controls the PP due to the amount of budget and the inhabitants who depend on it. It is also a symbolic square, since since the 90s of the last century it has been considered one of the main fiefdoms of the right. But no one can now rule out that at the start of the electoral cycle the extreme right will opt for the blockade to try to win the election at the polls. overtaking to a PP absolutely worn out by Mazón’s attitude.
Abascal’s reaction this Monday is certainly not flattering for the interests of the PP in both Madrid and Valencia. For the leader of Vox, the leadership of the popular party made the decision about Mazón without consulting with the extreme right. “The Popular Party with Vox acts in the following way: ‘here you have lentils if you want them well and if you don’t leave them’. It seems that they still don’t know us. What do I have to say about the future? That the Popular Party seems to be in major internal disputes. First, let them clarify among themselves and when they decide what they are going to do or what they are going to propose, then – and only then – we will say what our position is,” Abascal settled this Monday. Génova does not rule out also overseeing the negotiations on a new president from Madrid.
For the moment, both Feijóo and Mazón ignored the outcry of the Valencian people against the management of the latter, staged in up to twelve demonstrations in the last year, and even after the president’s resignation, they consider that responsibility for the 2024 Dana tragedy has nothing to do with the disappearance of Mazón from the crisis team during the afternoon of the flood or with the delay with which the Generalitat sent the Es-Alert message to the Valencians. The blame lies, according to them, with the Government of Pedro Sánchez, so the strategy of both Génova 13 and the Valencian PP will consist in the coming days of praising the move to Mazón’s side to hold Moncloa responsible for the tragedy.
“No national emergency depends on a single person,” Feijóo said this Monday, trying to offload the blame on Mazón, and then considering that the tragedy “was a national emergency that the nation’s government did not attend to.” For Feijóo, “Sanchez should have left much longer ago.” Before Mazón himself, I wanted to say. “And he will leave,” he concluded. In fact, the leader of the PP considered that Mazón “has decided to resign because the situation and his personal strength did not allow him to continue” and not because of his mistakes. “It gives a lesson to those who do not assume anything, no matter how serious it may be,” he added.
The president opted for his usual story, full of errors and lies. “A year ago I announced that I was committed to guaranteeing reconstruction. I have never been oblivious to the mood of public opinion, but I have tried to fight for the truth and the true causes of the tragedy to be known. The noise around me is the perfect excuse to hide the Government’s failures. I am not going to call them murderers for making mistakes in their predictions,” he concluded. This Tuesday Mazón will chair the meeting of the Consell, so he will continue making decisions about the Valencians until, if Vox wants, his successor is chosen as head of the Valencian Generalitat. And Feijóo also depends on the extreme right for his turnaround on his Valencian baron to be a success or to deepen the electoral gap between both formations.
Source: www.eldiario.es
