How governmental dysfunction contributed to the flood disaster in Valencia.
It’s clear whom Spaniards blame for the devastating floods that hit Spain on October 29th, as a result of which 229 people lost their lives and five are still missing. A few days after the disaster, when Spain’s Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, King Felipe VI, and his wife Queen Letizia visited the town of Paiporta in the northeastern region of Valencia—the worst affected area, in which 221 people died—citizens hurled mud and insults at them.
Valencia’s conservative president, Carlos Mazón, was also part of this unwelcomed delegation, but soon withdrew along with Sanchez after being pelted with mud. To the local residents, they represent a dysfunctional political class that failed to provide sufficient warning about the torrential rainfall, and which has since been slow and ineffective in its response. That overpopulated class consists of an estimated 300–400,000 total politicians operating at four levels of government: municipal (town/village), provincial (ZIP code/county), regional (state), and central.
In the immediate aftermath of the floods, representatives of that vast number of politicians were nowhere to be seen. Thousands of volunteers took charge of the recovery efforts, some of whom represented fringe groups eager to capitalize on public anger and disillusionment with the establishment. That sentiment has already propelled a new right-wing group, The Party Is Over (Se Acabó la Fiesta), to secure its first seats in the European Parliament—a trend likely to be exacerbated by the state’s response to the floods.
Two sides have emerged in the floods’ political fallout: left and central versus right and regional. The focus of their dispute is the interplay between regional and central powers in a highly decentralized state. Spain’s seventeen autonomous regions are to a large extent self-governing, except in times of crisis, when Madrid can intervene either by decree or upon request. During the pandemic, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez suspended regional autonomy by declaring a nationwide State of Alarm (although imposing lockdown via this mechanism was later ruled illegal); and in October 2017, after an unconstitutional declaration of independence in Catalonia, Mariano Rajoy’s Conservative government dissolved the Catalan parliament and seized control of the region.
Sanchez has pledged €13 billion in aid and sent over 17,000 soldiers, civil guard, and police officers to Valencia; but he hasn’t declared a national State of Emergency, which would enable his government to coordinate the recovery mission. In this case, according to the Prime Minister, “substituting for the regional administration would reduce efficiency”—a bizarre statement, given how inefficient the regional response has been so far. Mazón, for his part, claims that he was waiting for Spain’s emergency military unit (UME) to take control after the floods; but according to the UME’s chief, Javier Marcos, assistance had not been requested: “I can have 1,000 men at the door of the emergency but I can’t go in, legally, without authorization from the head of the emergency”—in this case Mazón. Had the regional leader raised the level of alert from two to three, state intervention would have been triggered.
The problem for Mazón is that he can’t criticize central authorities for lack of initiative without opening himself up to the same charge. An estimated 130,000 people attended a demonstration in Valencia on November 9th demanding his resignation—but so far, despite offering a somewhat lame apology for his handling of the crisis, Mazón has refused to step down. Along with blaming the central government, he also points his finger at AEMET, Spain’s national Meteorological agency, for its role in the crisis.
Mazón claims that AEMET failed to offer sufficient warnings of the deluge. This, presumably, is how he justifies his announcement at 1 PM on October 29th that, “according to the forecast,” the storm’s intensity would diminish by 6 PM. After that, he went to lunch with a journalist for five hours and didn’t arrive at the emergency control center until 7 PM.
Despite Mazón’s claims to the contrary, meteorological information about the forthcoming downpour was available. AEMET released a warning five days before the storm broke, predicting that there would be torrential rainfall in the region. At 7:30 AM on October 29th, it issued a Red Alert for all of Valencia, advising citizens to avoid travel because of “extreme meteorological risk.” Just before midday, Valencia’s water confederation warned of ravine overflows in the south of the province. However, citizens did not receive alerts on their mobile phones until shortly after 8 PM, long after the floods had begun. Salome Padras, Valencia’s interior minister, claims that she was not even aware of the existence of the ES-Alert text system, introduced in 2023 to warn of natural disasters.
Responsibility at both the national and regional levels goes back further than the immediate build-up to the floods. One of the first things Mazón did after winning the Valencian regional election in May 2023 (after which his conservative Popular Party [PP] formed a coalition with right-wing ally Vox) was to abolish an emergency response unit set up by the previous Socialist-led administration. Last fall, the PP-Vox partnership voted against a proposal by Compromís, a regional leftist alliance, to tackle “the increasing risks of flooding in the Mediterranean”—a notion the party also raised three times in October alone. (Vox’s exit from the coalition in June this year left Mazón’s government with a minority.) Its proposal was ignored, despite the fact that Valencia has experienced severe flooding before, most notably in 1957, when 81 people were killed, and again in 1982 and 1987.
At the national level, the attention is also focused on a decision by Spain’s environment minister and third deputy prime minister, Teresa Ribera, to scrap an initiative that might have reduced the scale of the disaster in Valencia. A proposal to channel the Poyo ravine, which caused some of the worst flash flooding on October 29th, was initially approved by the conservative administration of Jose Maria Aznar in 2009. It was sidelined by successive central governments until Ribera finally axed it in 2021, on the basis that it was too expensive and environmentally interventionist.
On the most fundamental level, of course, Valencia’s floods were a natural disaster—an extreme weather event that would have caused tremendous damage even if the entire area had been evacuated in advance. But they were not entirely unprecedented, nor was there a lack of information about the incoming storm. Their destructive effects were undoubtedly exacerbated by governmental dysfunction at both the national and regional levels, and a breakdown of communication and understanding between the two.
