Target of criticism since the floods which ravaged the south-east of Spain a year ago, agony of insults during the tribute paid Wednesday to the 237 victims of the disaster, the president of the Valencia region Carlos Mazón ended up resigning on Monday.
“I can’t take it anymore”: at the end of a twenty-minute press conference during which this leader of the Popular Party (PP, right) continued to defend himself and shoot down his detractors, and in particular the left-wing government of Pedro Sánchez, Carlos Mazón finally announced his resignation.
“I appeal to this majority to elect a new president of the Generalitat (…) If it were up to me, I would have resigned a long time ago. There were unbearable moments for me, but especially for my family,” explained the regional president, barely five days after being the target of insults from relatives of flood victims, during the state funeral organized a year after the disaster.
For a year, Carlos Mazón, who changed his version several times about his activities on the day of the tragedy, was in turmoil and thousands of residents of the region demanded his departure every month during demonstrations. Acknowledging “mistakes,” Carlos Mazón admitted Monday that he should have canceled his appointments on that tragic afternoon: “I should have had the political vision to cancel my schedule and go there.”
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“The responsibilities of government”
But his mea-culpa was accompanied by new criticism of the central government of socialist Pedro Sánchez: “The noise around me is the perfect excuse to hide the government’s responsibilities, both in the erroneous information they transmitted on October 29, and in the delay in the delivery of aid in the following days.”
Many questions remain about the disastrous management of the disaster by the region’s right-wing government, and in particular where Carlos Mazón was when, according to the victims, the decision should have been taken to send an alert to the population, ultimately launched very late in the evening. The message warning the population of the danger and urging them to take shelter was only sent at 8:11 p.m., when many victims had already lost their lives.
This trained lawyer initially hid the fact that he had spent four hours – from 2:45 p.m. to 6:45 p.m. – having lunch in a restaurant with a journalist to, according to him, offer her a job. Above all, the mystery remains over the last hour of his absence, during which the authorities were waiting for someone to decide to send the alert. During this time, Carlos Mazón rejected several appeals.
The woman with whom he had lunch, Maribel Vilaplana, is heard Monday morning by the judge in charge of the investigation into the floods. The journalist recently broke her silence and revealed that the regional president had accompanied her to her car, in a parking lot located opposite the presidential headquarters. As regional president, Carlos Mazón has until now benefited from immunity preventing him from being questioned and worried by the ordinary court which is investigating the case, while his former adviser for emergency situations has been indicted.