Thousands of people manifest against the president of the community of Valencia for their management of floods in Spain

Tens of thousands of people demonstrated on Saturday in the Spanish city of Valencia to request the resignation of the president of the region, Carlos Mazón, for his management of the mortal floods in October, according to AFP journalists.

Indignation and pain are still latent four months after the worst natural catastrophe of the last decades in Spain, which claimed the lives of 232 people, 224 of them in the east of the Valencian Community.

In the protest, convened by dozens of civil society unions and associations, the protesters – some holding photos of their deceased loved ones – chanted «Mazón resignation» and marched behind a banner in which «our relatives have died for your incompetence.»

Banners with slogans such as «Mazón in prison», «murderers» and «neither forgive, nor forget» accompanied a gigantic cardboard figure that represented Mazón with his hands stained with blood.

The central government office in Valencia estimated at about 30,000 the number of protesters.

In Spain, a politically decentralized country, the regions are responsible for emergency management, which means that Mazón headed a widely considered poorly considered response.

A mass alert reached the telephone numbers of the residents when most of the victims had already died drowned in their homes or dragged by the flood in the streets, according to the judicial summary of the case, released by the Spanish press.

This week, Mazón unleashed a wave of indignation after giving a new version about his whereabouts on October 29, when torrential rains began to trigger floods that razed homes and vehicles.

The Socialist Party, in the Central Government, urged the leader of the Popular Party (PP), Alberto Núñez Feijóo, of the conservative opposition, to dismiss his Mazón party partner.

Feijóo «knows that Mazón is toxic» and can end «the unbearable situation» dismissing it, the socialist minister of Science, Diana Morant, in the town of Picanya, affected by the floods on Saturday.

Mazón may have a majority in the regional Parliament «as indecent as he sustains him, but he no longer has the majority of the street,» he added.

The PP spokesman, Miguel Tellado, said that the socialists «use the pain of the Valencian people to make politics of the shabby, the lowest and I think that is intolerable.»

Mazón has repeatedly rejected the calls to resign and has pledged to direct the colossal reconstruction process until the end of his mandate, in 2027.

Saturday’s protest was the fifth of a series of demonstrations against Mazón that began with a concentration of 130,000 people in Valencia in November.

AFP